


the planets will bow

by skywideopen



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: DW-verse, Doctor Who AU, Emma is a Time Lady, F/F, Non-graphic references to torture, Swan Queen Supernova, no knowledge of doctor who actually required, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 73,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8761300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skywideopen/pseuds/skywideopen
Summary: It all becomes a sort of blur after a while, a wash of colour and sound from places and times so extraordinary and beyond her powers to describe. But through it all, amidst all of time and space, her son is laughing, her son is smiling, and that remains the most important gift that Emma has given to Regina."Thank you," she tells Emma quietly, as Henry happily—happily—eats ice-cream whilst dangling his legs over the edge of an observation platform into space, the swirling colours of a glowing nebula surrounding them. "For doing this for us.""Any time," Emma says, thumbs in the pockets of her coat. "It's the least I could do."[Doctor Who AU: On a cold, wintry night, Regina Mills meets a Time Lady.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [curiouslycurious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/curiouslycurious/gifts).



> Hello! So this is a Doctor Who AU. You do not need to have watched Doctor Who read this story. If you need a quick rundown of the premise, it is this: a human-like alien (a Time Lord/Lady) with multiple lives has a time machine and takes a human companion on adventures throughout time and space.
> 
> Thank you to my many betas, especially Laura and Swati and Zohra and Pleth for helping me with plot ideas and readthroughs. And a massive thanks to the SQSN mods for organising all this, it's been great to see so many great fics and artworks going up. Finally, if you haven't seen the accompanying artwork to this fic by curiouslycurious, please go check it out, it's wonderful. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

_Lying together in the park on Seventh,_  
_our backs smoosh grass and I say_  
_I will love you till I become a child again,_  
_when feeding me and bathing me is no longer romantic,_  
_but rather necessary._  
  
_I will love you till there is no till._  
_Till I die._  
_And when that electroencephalogram shuts down, baby_  
_that’s when the real lovin’ kicks in._

 

* * *

 

  **the planets will bow.**

 

On a cold, wintry night, Regina Mills meets a Time Lady.

She isn't expecting to, of course, and nor does she have any idea what a _Time Lady_ is at the time. No, she's too busy reading through reports and writing emails, filling the evening with the useful, mindless busywork of Mayoral duty as the sky darkens and the thin patter of rain on the window behind her desk threatens to harden into snow. It's mind-numbing work that she could easily hand off to a secretary or some other underling, but she actually enjoys it in a strange sort of way—savours it even, for the alternative is hours and hours of loitering in her son's room, attending to his every need, trying not to react when he inevitably brushes her off with a muttered _you aren't my real mom_ —

But anyway.

She's just settling in for a few hours of work before bed when the room lights up a brilliant orange and she jerks in her chair with a gasp as an almighty explosion sends shudders through her seat.

Startled, alarmed, she rushes over to the window where that near blinding-light had been most intense. There's a cloud of black smoke rising from the middle of her backyard where once there was her apple tree— _her apple tree!_

If some hooligan or anarchist had pulled some stunt—one of her political rivals, maybe, or a distraught relative of one of the people who’d gone missing of late—there will be hell to pay. A part of her, a measured, rational and long-suffering part of her, cautions that it's probably wildly unsafe to be outside when there's been an explosion in her _own backyard_ —but as usual, she ignores it, and doesn't even break stride as she grabs a coat and marches downstairs.

She soon reaches the back door, and opens it to her backyard—but almost closes it again immediately, taken aback by the intensity of the heat mere yards away, completely banishing the usual winter chill. There's another loud bang, albeit smaller than the first, and another gout of flame rises from what was once her beloved honeycrisp tree, planted with fruit from her childhood farm. She really should just go back inside, away from the flames and call the police, the FBI and probably the Governor too—

But she doesn't, because the flames clear and she spots a flash of red. Not the blazing incandescent golden-red of the flames, but darker, almost maroon… _leather_?

_Is that—?_

Gingerly, she steps forward, towards the heat. As she gets closer, the billowing pitch-black smoke begins to dissipate, clearing the scene a little. She doesn't get too close, though, because the flames aren't dying down, and if anything they're getting even fiercer, threatening to consume everything in what she can now see is a small crater surrounded by burning branches and charred, pulverised pieces of apple, within which she can see pieces of metal and an— _arm_ , clad in red leather, hanging limply over the crater's lip.

It's stupid. It's extremely unwise, dangerous in the extreme, particularly when whatever calamity—a  bomb? a crash?—had befallen that sorry individual, and she can already hear her mother's voice in her mind, berating her for her foolishness, telling her that _your destiny is to rule the entire universe, not to worry herself about the fate of one insipid fool_ —

She grits her teeth, puts her head down, and heads towards the fire.

She almost regrets it immediately, as there's a small explosion, a spitting gout of flame from the burning pile of what looks like metal at the heart of the crater. The heat is  _intense_ , and she's starting to sweat even in the sub-thirty temperatures, and she's wondering whether this is at  _all_ wise or even worthwhile—

But then she hears a groan and a cry from the crater, and she runs forward again without thinking.

There's a shift in the wind, blowing smoke away from Regina as she reaches the lip of the crater, and by crouching and covering her head she manages to reach the woman, whom she sees is trapped under a very heavy-looking chunk of metal. She has curly blonde hair, which is currently messy but Regina suspects would be quite striking in the daylight. She's conscious and trying to tug herself out, but she seems exhausted and dazed, half-overcome by smoke inhalation, unable to focus on anything and with skin covered in soot, a look only partially offset by the strange gold-yellow glow surrounding her—

Regina blinks. It's a trick of the light, probably—and she has other things to worry about right now.

"Can you hear me?" she yells, then coughs—thirty seconds, that's as long as she'll give this, or she'll probably burn alive in here.

The woman blinks at Regina, looking confused. "What... who are..."

" _Can you hear me?_ "

"I—yes." The woman nods, slowly. "Yeah."

Regina takes this as enough, and turns to the metal piece currently trapping the woman's leg. It's a painted yellow panel of some kind, and it's been wedged deep into the earth as if pushed down with great force—or dropped from a great height. She grabs it—and almost releases it immediately, because it is  _hot_ —and pulls, but it doesn't come fully loose straight away.

 _Damn it_. "Can you help me with this?" she yells. The flames are dying down, she notices, which is probably the only reason they both haven't been burned alive, but her head is feeling light and she really,  _really_ needs to get out of here.

The woman still looks totally disoriented, barely aware of her surroundings. "I... I don't know. Where am I? Who are you?"

 _For the love of—_ "I'm Regina Mills, Mayor of Storybrooke," she grits out, tries yanking on the metal once again. It comes slightly loose—which is good, because much more of this and her skin will start to blister. "And you _blew up my apple tree._ "

Finally,  _finally_ , the woman's attention sharpens a little and she starts tugging on the metal panel too, finally, starting to shift meaningfully. "Storybrooke—America? Earth?"

For a second, Regina wonders if this woman is having a lend of her—but surely not in  _this_ situation,  _now_. "Yes,  _Earth_. And you'll enjoy your time in an  _Earth_ jail if you don't help me— _pull!_ "

At this, the woman focuses at last, putting her full weight into moving the metal panel, and with a last, almighty heave, it comes loose, freeing her trapped leg. Regina quickly slides an arm under the woman's shoulders and scrambles her away from the burning crater, only to be thanked by a high-pitched yelp.

"Ow— _ow!_  My ankle!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, next time I  _won't_ save your life," Regina snaps, but she slowly lowers the woman down to the ground. From here, in the cool of night, she can see that her eyes either hadn't been playing tricks on her before, or they're playing a much more elaborate trick on her now, as the woman seems surrounded by an  _aura_ of golden-yellow light, a thin glowing mist rising from her body.  _Just like Father had before he died—_

She blinks, and the glow is gone, taking the stray thought with it.

"Who are you?" she asks, crouching down to be at the woman's eye level.

The woman's mouth rapidly opens, then closes, then opens again, as if she's unsure of how to even answer the question. "Em..." she begins slowly, like she's enunciating the word for the first time and hasn't quite gotten her tongue around it yet. "Em—ma."

"Emma?" Regina repeats cautiously. It isn't a difficult name, why had this woman had such difficulty with it? Maybe she's just insane—which would at least go some way to explaining why she'd destroyed Regina's apple tree.

"Emma Swan," she says then, more confidently. "Sorry. New body, new mouth. Time Lady problems, you know?"

Which makes precisely zero sense to Regina, but she isn't concerned by the ramblings of a madwoman right now. "You destroyed my apple tree."

Emma Swan frowns. "I... destroyed your apple tree?"

Regina glares. " _Yes._ And since it was my  _favourite_ , planted with fruit from my father's farm, you'd better explain what exactly happened here and why, or you'll find yourself spending the rest of the night as the guest of the police department."

Emma's eyes widen and go round, bright and... a little scared, Regina thinks. She opens her mouth, and Regina thinks she's about to get some madcap explanation which makes no sense whatsoever, but instead a small cough comes out.

And a little wisp of golden-yellow dust.

They both stare at it with slack-jawed shock as it rises into the dark of light, dancing upwards against the falling flakes of snow, before dissipating.

"Oh," Emma lets out, then faints.

 

* * *

 

After checking that, yes, Emma is just unconscious and hadn't keeled over and died on the spot, Regina decides to lay the unconscious stranger down on the sitting room couch—though with hesitation, as she's coated in a thin, patchy layer of soot. Now that she can get a better look at her with indoor lighting, Regina can see that Emma looks young, younger than her, and healthy-looking—strangely so given her recent ordeal, with nothing but cuts and rips to her clothes to show for her troubles. She's taking only small breaths and she's pale, though, that strange golden-yellow glow having long departed—if it had even been there in the first place as opposed to some weird trick of the flaming light, which is very possible.

Regina purses her lips. She should probably go to the police—she really _should_  go to the police, given that this Emma was clearly doing _something_ untoward in her backyard, but she doesn't. She doesn't know exactly _why_ , but she doesn't—as if there's a little voice in her head silently cajoling her to stay with this mysterious blonde arsonist, an impulse, a curiosity she can't quite explain as she studies the unconscious _Emma_ —

She's abruptly taken out of her thoughts, though, by the voice of her son, Henry.

"What's going on?" he asks, and Regina does a brief double take. "Is everything OK?"

She turns to face him. He's at the top of the stairs, already in his sleeping clothes, leaning over the railing with apprehension on his face, his dark brown hair falling across his face somewhat. She's tried to get him to get him to cut it, but to little avail.

She gives him a smile that isn't returned. "Fine, sweetheart. Nothing to worry about."

A year ago, he would have believed her, turned and gone back to bed—but not now. Not now. "I thought I heard something really big, like a crash," he says instead, "I think we should call the cops—"

"No police."

Regina turns back.

"That's what you were talking about outside, right?" Emma says from the couch, eyes wide open as she pushes herself up to a sitting position and turns to face the two of them. "You were gonna call the police. The cops."

Regina folds her arms across her chest, takes one, two steps across the stone floor, Henry skipping down the steps behind to join her.

"You trespassed onto my home," Regina starts slowly, low and hard. "Started a fire, or set off a bomb, or whatever the hell you did—you could easily gotten me or my son killed. You _killed my apple tree._ "

Emma swallows visibly. "I know, I—I'm sorry, I'll fix it, I promise. Just—don't call the police, okay? Or the hospital."

Regina stares. "You almost literally burned to death in that fire, and I'm positive there's something not right with your heart." Regina had checked Emma's pulse—it had been bizarrely rapid and erratic, the beats coming in a strange rhythm she hadn't been able to work out.

"I'm fine now. See?" Emma holds up her hands, and Regina does indeed see that they're completely unblemished. "It's weird, I know, but I—I can explain, I promise."

"Alright. So explain."

Emma opens her mouth—then closes it again immediately, almost as if swallowing the words that had been on the verge of falling out of her mouth. "It's complicated."

"How convenient."

"It is! It's—fine." Emma sighs, runs her hands through her messy, ash-coated hair. "I'm not from this world. I mean, I grew up here but I'm not, like,  _from_ here technically."

Regina stares for a moment, frowning, and is about to ask _what the hell that's supposed to mean_ when—

"You mean you're you're not from Earth?" Henry asks curiously.

She cringes, shoots her son a reproving glare—which, as normal these days, is summarily ignored as he steps in front of her. "Henry—"

"Like, you're an alien?"

" _Henry_ —”

"A _real_ alien?"

Emma bobs her head up and down. "Yeah."

Regina stops.

Emma is looking down at her palms, which at first glance seems a shy, nervous sort of gesture—but on closer inspection she's staring at them too intensely, too transfixed for it to be merely that.

"I mean, if you mean what you think I mean then yeah, I'm an alien."

"Oh," Henry says, as if taking the news in his stride—but Regina can already see the brightness in his eyes, his posture a little straighter than usual as he begins to bounce on the balls of his feet. "So, like, is that your spaceship outside—"

"Henry, that's _enough_ ," Regina cuts across him. She tries to bodily push him back behind her and out of Emma's sight, but he forces her arm off him.

"You don't get to tell me what to do. You aren't my _real mom_ ," he retorts angrily, giving her a furious glare, and it takes all her willpower not to physically recoil.

She breathes in, breathes out, steadies herself.

"Go back to bed, Henry," she says, looking him straight in the eye, refusing to break gaze, refusing to let even a hint of the weakness enter her voice. "We'll talk about this in the morning."

A second, two, where he doesn't move, doesn't do _anything_ but obstinately just _stand there_ and scowl at her—before giving one more angry shrug and brushing past her as he skips up the stairs two at the time to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose, listening to the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

She isn't even angry about the insubordination any more—in front of a seemingly mad stranger who had destroyed her tree, no less—she's just tired. Two weeks of this, two weeks of cold shoulders and silent dinners and furious one-sided arguments and she's just... so tired.

“I’m sorry,” Emma says softly, and Regina opens her eyes again.

"Excuse me?"

“About that. Seeing that and—I’m sorry,” Emma says again, looking down at her hands. "He's lucky, you know. Your kid," Emma continues, the softness in her voice replicated in the gentleness of her expression—the _longing?_ "He's adopted, isn't he?"

Regina gives her a narrow-eyed glare. "And how would you know that?"

A shrug. "I spent a lot of time in orphanages. Kids there were always so jealous of the kids who got adopted early."

"Yes, well, try explaining _that_ to him."

"I will, if you want."

It takes Regina a moment to realise that Emma is being completely serious. "If this is some way to coax me into—"

"It isn't!" Emma interjects, her eyes briefly flashing. "It's—look, I do owe you for the whole tree thing. But he looks like a good kid and you obviously care about him. If I'd just had that..."

And yes, that is definitely longing that Regina sees now. She sighs.

"In return, I guess you still want me to not call the police, or the hospital, or the mental asylum."

“The—what?" Emma's eyebrows crease with confusion—then shoot upwards, as her eyes widen. "I'm not making it up!"

"Convincing."

"I'm _not_! The heart thing is just because I have two of them, and—" Emma begins, her voice rising in pitch before abruptly cutting off, like she'd remembered just in the nick of time not to divulge some closely-held secret. "Look. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can prove it to you in, like, five minutes."

Regina just stands there, arms folded across her chest again.

Emma sighs audibly. "Fine. One minute. And we'll just stay in your backyard. Promise."

It's insane. It's absolutely, certifiably insane, and if anything it's even _more_  reason to take this woman straight to the police and get her away from her son permanently—but then.

But then she remembers that longing, that undisguised _yearning_ on Emma's face when she'd looked at Henry—at _Regina_ and Henry, as if even the crumbled pieces of their relationship is something to _strive for_. But then she sees that fidgeting eagerness now as Emma twists her fingers together, that shining sincerity that tells that maybe, just maybe...

"One minute."

 

* * *

 

It doesn't even take thirty seconds.

Regina had been questioning that it'd happen at _at all_ , of course; but upon stepping outside, the sight of the previously-fierce flames having being replaced by a lightly smoking crater containing a whole car—a _car_  of all things. A hideous little yellow VW Beetle that looks like it should have been melted down for scrap some time in the last four decades at least, but it's _there_. It at least explains what the enormous metal object was that made getting Emma out of the fire such a tightrope affair, and it gives her enough pause to go along.

Still...

"This better be good," she warns, clambering gingerly down the crater to where the car has been embedded in the soil, as if it had crashed down from the unseen heavens above.

Emma opens the door, her face now illuminated by a warm glow seemingly from within.

"It is."

Regina steps inside and—

Well, it hadn't even been thirty seconds. Not least because while it looks like a car on the outside, on the inside, it's—not.

The room—the _room_ —is lit a gentle sort of orange, a comforting tone which matches the homely feel given by the various odds and ends—clothes, notebooks, boxes, other random items and contraptions that Regina doesn't recognise—strewn about everywhere. She almost could have believed that she'd walked into a teenager's bedroom, or Henry's when he's feeling mutinous, if it weren't for the enormous central column dead centre in the room, covered in steel mesh and flanked by two panels of knobs and levers that Regina just _knows_ already that she shouldn't touch.

Whatever this thing is, it sure isn't a car.

"So this is my Bug," Emma says, motioning around the room with a broad sweep of her arms. There's an energy to Emma now, a bright eagerness about her as she skips up to the central console, flicking random switches along the way. "It's—um, not a car, as I guess you can tell."

"I can tell," Regina breathes out, eyes bulging a little as they absorb her surroundings, take in every last detail of this room—this room _inside a car_. "It's... it's..."

Emma takes half a step back towards Regina, bouncing on her heels. "Yeah?"

Regina opens her mouth, considers for a moment with the small part of her brain not yet paralysed with shock—"It's messy."

Emma's shoulders slump a little, the little up-curl of her lips fading. "Oh. Um—yeah, I should probably clean it up. But it's been kind of hectic around here lately, I haven't really had time with work and all."

"Work?" Fine, the sooty face and ragged, singed clothes may be skewing Regina's perception of Emma somewhat, but the woman does not strike her as having exactly a stable Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five working life, what with the alien spaceship and tree-killing and all. Still, she's aware that her perceptions aren't to be trusted tonight. "What kind of work?"

Emma's smile fades even further. "I find people, wherever they are. It's something I'm good at, I guess."

Regina reads between the lines of Emma's unsaid words and the sudden awkwardness of her posture, and her eyes narrow a little. "You're a bounty hunter."

"No! No, I—" Emma swallows, lowers her gaze. "I only work for people who are good. I mean, I think they're good. It's a really big universe out there, and sometimes people get lost in it."

"I see," Regina says, keeping her voice determinedly neutral as she runs her fingers through a set of arcane, intricate engravings running the length of one of the walls. God, if she could just spend an hour, a _day_ in this thing, cavorting through the universe—but she can't. She has her life and her son, and she learned a long time ago what really matters.

"Well, you've made your point. Do try to avoid any apple trees next time you decide to crash-land in these parts," she advises, turning towards the door to leave.

"Wait—you're leaving?" Emma asks, her voice raising in pitch, caught somewhere between surprise and disappointment. "But I haven't even shown you the best bit yet!"

She stops with her hand on the door-handle (exactly like that of a car door, she notices off-hand). "What?"

"This thing—this thing isn't just a spaceship," Emma says, that breathless eagerness, that sincere plaintiveness returning to her voice again as she skips over to Regina, close enough to touch. "It's so much more than just a spaceship."

Regina breathes out, looks Emma straight in the eye. "I have a son to take care of and a life to live. I can't just _run off_ and see the universe."

Something in Regina's words must have stung, because Emma recoils visibly—and to her own surprise, Regina feels a nasty drop in her stomach at the sight.

"I—I know, I'm not asking you to _run away_ or anything. Just—" Emma pauses, waits, places an arm around Regina's wrist, tugging gently, imploringly. "Give me five more minutes. Please? Henry won’t even know we’re gone, so you can see that I'm—I'm not mad, and to thank you for not calling the cops, and for saving my life."

Regina stares at Emma's face, then down at the hand enclosing her arm, then back up at Emma's face again, eyes so clear Regina is momentarily fooled into thinking they're glass, giving her a view straight into the eagerness, the _urge_ to show Regina something truly incredible.

"Five more minutes," Emma repeats softly.

Regina looks one more time—and nods.

Emma smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you _have_ watched DW, you'll notice that this story has been strongly influenced by S5 in particular, with a few other elements from other seasons thrown in here and there. You'll know which episodes if you've seen them.


	2. Chapter 2

Regina's father used to tell her about the stars.

They were always beautiful and distant, awe-inspiring and slightly terrifying the way he spoke about them—not the mystical pinpricks of light in the night sky that they seemed to everyone else, but furious, blazing infernos scattered throughout space and time, raging ceaselessly against the permanence of the void surrounding them. He told her about civilisations were forged from their fire, empires rose and fell, unknown people from unknown races far removed from humanity had their stories play out in a million million ways throughout the universe.

Regina had found the stories transfixing, captivating, utterly unlike anything she knew, but the stories had stopped long ago. For one thing, her mother had always hated them— _fanciful dreams are for the little people_ —and Regina had always done what Mother wished.

Until she hadn't one day, because Regina's father had died, and Mother had disappeared.

In any case, she'd thought the stories were just stories, bedtime tales from a father who just wanted to keep that spark in his daughter's eye alive for one more night, one more day, but she's reconsidering it now.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Emma murmurs next to her.

Regina can't help but nod silently, her mouth hanging open as she tries to absorb what she's seeing—a star system of some kind, that much she can tell. Not _her_ star system, though, because last she checked there's only one Sun, not three, red, yellow and blue. Nor could she remember reading about any planets like the one they're situated next to, mixed green, blue and violet hues mixing in violent swirls dotted by flashes of lightning strikes.

"I like to to come here when I'm feeling lonely," Emma says. "It may not look like it, but a lot of people live around here. I was one of them for a while."

Regina can't imagine how—but on closer inspection, some of the lights she thought were lightning flashes are actually static, unmoving, one or two even blinking periodically.

"People live here?" Regina asks, rediscovering her voice. "What the hell could they be doing?" A beautiful scene, yes—but a habitable one, Regina isn't so sure. Those storms look very, very large.

"It's a mining colony called New Prospect. There's some weird gas in the clouds which is really valuable, I think. People have been living on really huge platforms in the clouds for, god, decades."

"And it's... safe? Those storms don't cause problems?" She tries to envisage raising Henry in a place like this.

Emma shrugs. "Sometimes platforms get blown away when a solar hurricane goes through, but people put up with it. They have to. You develop a thick skin when you live in a place like this."

There's something distant about the way Emma says that, something that hints at more than just general knowledge— _ah._

"So you're a native of... whatever this place is?" Regina motions out the open door—hesitantly, as if doing so will see her sucked out into the empty void beyond, but Emma had insisted that it's safe—and down at the planet below."

"God, no. Like I said, I grew up on Earth."

"But you're an alien," Regina points out.

"Yeah, it's complicated. This was a good place to blend in for a while, though. It's a human colony, like, four thousand years into your future. "

There's silence for a moment.

"You mean..." Regina starts slowly, cautiously.

"Yeah."

"So this is—in the future?"

"Yeah." That small, puppy-dog smile is back on Emma's face again. "I told you I was saving the best bit."

Regina's turns away from her, looks back at the planet, tries to process this latest piece of information. Oddly, in a strange sort of way, it makes sense—maybe Emma's awful car disguise for her spaceship is merely that, but she hasn't been able to glean any clues as to how the thing flies, or indeed how it moves at all. A time machine teleporting throughout the universe, though, somehow fits.

 _Just like in Father's stories_...

She blinks, clears her head. If she thinks about _that_  whole thing too hard she fears her head might explode, so instead she turns to one other small thing about Emma's words that had bothered her.

"Alright. Show me."

Emma’s eyes are gleaming with the light of the triple suns before she closes the door, skips back up to the central console and pulls the throttle down.

 

* * *

 

“You said this was a human colony.”

Emma’s smile is far too settled and smug for Regina’s comfort. "Yeah."

Regina blinks at the scene around her, slightly lost for words. “But…”

“I never said it was _just_ a human colony, did I?”

Emma certainly hadn’t, and on closer inspection Regina can tell that a lot of the people—beings, things, whatever—around her are in fact human. They're just dressed in all-covering clothing which she gathers are protective suits of some kind, but also covered in soot and dust of all colours and shades, like living, walking kaleidoscopes.

And then, of course, are the ones who are distinctly _not_ human.

Some of them are close enough to human to not be _too_ shocking on the eyes, to be fair. There’s a man with bright scarlet skin, a woman with what Regina swears are gills, someone with five eyes—and okay, that’s a little more striking, but nothing too drastic. But then there are the ones who are not even vaguely close: a centaur-like creature with antlers and cat’s eyes; a bear with long, thin front legs and twelve fingers; a two-metre tall—and Regina has to blink to make sure her eyes aren’t lying to her about this one—luminous mushroom with no eyes or mouth, but merrily flipping sausages in a hot dog stall nonetheless.

No one seems to pay the slightest attention to the two of them, though, nor do they notice that a bright yellow car has materialised right in the middle of the fairly narrow space, between the high metal walls which stretch far up into the distance.

“Why hasn’t anyone noticed us?” Regina asks, still blinking her eyes at—well, everything.

“The Bug has a local perception filter. It tricks people into thinking we aren’t here.”

“How underhanded of you.”

Emma shrugs. “Hey, it works. Now do you want to look around or...”

Emma trails off, her eyes having become oddly fixed on a corner of the room, where corridors lead off into the distance. Regina frowns, noting her sudden distraction.

“Miss Swan? What is it?”

Emma keeps staring, but nods in the direction that she’s looking at. Regina follows her gaze—and there, seated in a corner, utterly unnoticed by anyone around her, a little blonde girl hugging her knees to her chest, sobbing silently.

_Oh._

“What’s wrong with her?” Regina asks quietly.

“Dunno,” Emma replies in a voice which is suddenly tight, like the sight of the girl is far, far more meaningful than an unknown child on a distant world. Almost like she reminds Emma of herself, a lost girl on a harsh world that isn’t a world—

Regina sighs, berates herself for getting distracted so easily—and crosses the room, brushing past people and not-people as she carves a path through the throng. Emma makes a noise of surprise and grabs onto Regina’s wrist just as she’s about to be submerged in the crowd.

“Regina? Where are you going?”

Regina looks back at Emma, sees her frowning with concern—but her eyebrows are slightly raised and her eyes have brightened, her lips parting a little as if in surprise, like Regina had just revealed something of herself that Emma hadn’t expected. Well, Regina can’t blame her. She herself hadn’t expected to be here, making these decisions, but here she is anyway.

She knows what Henry would want her to do, after all.

She looks Emma in the eye, takes a breath.

“What do you usually do when you see children crying, Emma?”

Emma closes her mouth, the tension runs out of her shoulders but her mouth presses into a thinner, more determined line and the hand on Regina’s wrist tightens.

“Let’s go.”

They move across the room side by side, the crowd seemingly parting to let them make way. When they reach the little girl—no older than six or seven—they glance at each other briefly, the girl not seeming to give them any notice. Regina then bends over so she’s at the girl’s eye level.

“Hello?”

The girl’s sobs abruptly halt and she looks up at Regina with wide, glassy eyes.

“Who are you?” she asks in a small, cracked voice.

“I’m Regina, and this is Emma,” Regina says, motioning towards the still-standing Emma. “We’re here to help.”

The girl stares at Regina with wide, wide eyes and open-mouthed surprise for a few seconds, before abruptly clamping her jaw shut.

“You can’t help me,” she says in a small, almost inaudible voice, burying her face in her hands. “No one can help me.”

“I don’t think that’s true, kid,” Emma says softly, crouching down so she joins Regina at the girl’s eye level. “Where are your parents?”

The girl peeks up over her hands at Emma, studies for a moment—and must like what she sees in that bright face and welcoming smile, because she whispers, “Below.”

Emma mutters something under her breath that Regina is pretty sure is a curse of some kind. She gives her a sharp glare, but asks, “What’s that mean, Emma?”

“It means this kid’s an orphan,” Emma tells her grimly. “Her parents went down to the mines, never came back. Probably because they died, and no one bothered to tell their kid.” Regina studies Emma’s face closely, notices the way her expression has clouded, is briefly tempted to find out why.

She doesn’t say anything, though, and she turns her attention back to the child. “Are you alone, dear, or do you have any brothers or sisters?”

The girl gulps visibly. “I—I have a brother. But some of his friends told him that someone had found mother and he went and he—he hasn’t come back, none of them came back and…”

The little girl bursts into tears again, and says no more. Emma and Regina stand up, sighing in tandem. Regina looks down at the girl crying again, then up at Emma, the face of this strange alien woman she’s only just met and barely knows. She studies Emma carefully—she’s seen that tight press of the mouth before, the flint-eyed stubborn determination, the outrage at the injustice of children being mistreated like so.

Suddenly, she knows exactly what she should do. It just so happens to be exactly what her son would do as well.

 

* * *

 

The girl’s name is Gretel, they find out eventually. It takes a lot of work, as she’s shy and reserved, shooting nervous glances left and right at the uncaring adults around her, weaving unseen and shielded by both Emma and Regina’s bodies. She seems to warm to them a little as they descend the floors, taking metal stair after metal stair, and she starts talking about life growing up in an enormous metal metal box.

“Daddy always said we would be going to a _real_ planet,” Gretel says, her eyes brightening for the first time since they’d met her as Regina helps her down a long metal ladder. “He said that one day we would go to a place with _grass_ and _trees_ and _real rocks_.”

Emma squeezes the child’s shoulder. “Yeah. I know that feeling, kid.”

Regina eyes her carefully. “I didn’t think they would treat non-humans that badly.”

Emma blinks at her. “What?”

"But you aren't human."

A slight frown. "Yeah."

"But that means..."

The frown disappears as Emma's eyes widen. "Oh. Yeah. It wasn't that bad," Emma says with a nonchalant shrug, but she doesn't meet Regina's eyes as she says so. "I look human, after all. People didn't notice. I mean—it was tough, but not as tough as you might think."

Regina narrows her eyes. "And what do I think?"

"I dunno, that people were awful to me because I wasn't human? It wasn't—people _could_ be pretty awful, but not because of that. I never let them find that out. You have to have a thick skin here to make it, but you can if you’re tough, and little girls are _always_ tough. Isn’t that right, kid?"

The child shrugs and nods. There's more to the story, Regina can tell—but from the way Emma's shoulders have tensed and her eyes are darting left and right at anywhere but Regina herself, she decides that she shouldn't push. She doesn't _know_ this woman, after all, this strange, overgrown-teenager of an alien with a _time machine_ who crashed into her apple tree.

She could, of course. She could stay with Emma indefinitely, and learn the answers to all her questions. She could find out who this Emma is and why she's so desperate to remain anonymous. She could discover just what life holds in this future she's immersed in that doubles as Emma's past, could discover why Emma had looked at Regina and her son with such unveiled longing when he'd come into the room.

She could do all these things. All she needs do is ask, ask why Emma is running, whether she could run with her, see all those stories that Father had whispered in her ear and Mother had tried to twist into her own ambitions play out before her eyes. She could run and run and run—but she won't.

She can't.

She’s going to find this little girl’s family, and go home, back to her son and away from Emma Swan and the _life_ she offers her. “Fine,” she says shortly, definitively. “Now, where are we going?”

Emma’s face falls a little at Regina’s abrupt change of tack—just a little, but Regina still catches it—and she turns to face little Gretel. “Dunno. Kid, what are we looking for?”

Gretel pulls out something from her pocket, showing it to the two of them: a tiny polished white pebble, no bigger than a fingernail. Regina frowns at it as Emma takes it and holds it up to the light.

“What’s that for?”

“My brother used to keep them,” Gretel says shyly. “He always used to show them to me and say that they meant we’d find a home one day.”

Emma sighs and returns the pebble. “From a real planet. But why do you have them now?”

Gretel just points down the corridor, right down the end where, on the floor, Regina can see a near-identical white pebble sitting between the metal gratings. It clicks immediately for both of them.

“Smart,” Emma says, impressed. “Follow the pebble trail, huh?”

They do so, and the pebble trail soon takes them away from the main corridors and into clearly less-frequented parts of the station. They have to get past more than a few very securely locked doors to get there, and Regina is sure that they’ll have to find another route; but the way the pebbles are arranged into miniature arrows leaves Emma in no doubt that they’re on the right track—and locked doors are evidently no obstacle in her mind.

“Do you have _any_ respect for property?” Regina asks as Emma points some cylindrical, silver device against a heavy metal lock, pressing her ear to the door to listen for its response as the device—clearly a lock-picking contraption of some kind—buzzes away. “Or do you just have a liking for felony?”

Emma just rolls her eyes as the lock clicks open.

Before long, they’ve made their way down the levels and onto old, rusted metal catwalks criss-crossing fathomless drops that Regina most certainly does not— _not—_ want to look down. At least there are safety railings on either wide, and she holds onto them tightly with every step she takes. Gretel seems to know these areas quite well, though, or at least is familiar enough by them to not worry. Even so, Regina holds her hand out of instinct, guiding her away from some of the more sheer-looking drops and unsecured railings.

“So do you come from a planet?”

“I do,” Regina says, smiling down her despite the near-constant knot in her stomach. This girl is younger than Henry, but she’s obviously lived a hard, uncompromising life and that defiant streak in her eyes is very, very familiar. “It’s a world called Earth.”

“Is it nice?”

Regina hesitates. Storybrooke isn’t anyone’s idea of _pretty_ , but then she remembers fields of corn, rolling hills and moors and crisp morning air savoured from atop a horse—“It’s very nice, very beautiful, especially around the farm where I grew up when I was your age.”

Gretel frowns. “What’s a farm?”

Regina laughs warmly, and is about to launch into an explanation, but she catches sight of Emma—or, rather, catches sight of the place where Emma had been just seconds before, well, vanishing.

Her heart drops. “Emma? Emma!”

“Yeah?” Emma’s voice—Emma’s _disembodied_ voice—replies, sounding only vaguely perturbed. “What’s up, why the yelling?”

Regina feels marginally calmer, but only marginally. She spins around on the spot, searching in vain for the blonde-haired alien. “Where the hell are you?”

“Uh, right here, like five feet away from you,” Emma’s voice says, sounding genuinely baffled now. “Regina? You feeling okay?”

Feeling increasingly enraged and irritated, Regina looks down at Gretel for support, but the girl shakes her head, pointing straight in front of her at the vacant space ahead. Regina swallows, panic starting to rise in her throat.

“If this is some kind of practical joke—“

“It isn’t.” Then, out of nowhere, the air ripples in front of her, an invisible threshold is crossed and Emma reappears. Regina breathes freely again. “Seriously, Regina, can you not see me?”

Suddenly, Regina has an idea—or, at least, a suspicion. “Step back again.”

“What?”

“Step backwards.”

Emma frowns, obviously nonplussed, but she does so—and just like that, she disappears again as if swallowed by the air itself. Regina isn’t surprised by this, and after taking a preparatory breath to steel herself, she strides forwards—and nothing happens.

“Um, Regina?” Emma asks, and her voice is suddenly small. “Where’d you go?”

Regina steps back, and she can hear Emma sigh with relief. “Something very strange is going on here,” Regina declares. “Something at this spot is trying to toy with us.”

Out of nothing, Regina hears that same buzzing noise that had accompanied Emma picking the various locked doors on the way to this spot. “Miss Swan?”

“Hang on, I’m working this out,” Emma says, sounding distracted.

“Are you trying to pick an invisible lock?”

“ _No_ , Regina,” Emma groans, and Regina can almost hear the pout. “It’s not a lockpicker, it’s a sonic—you know what? I’ll explain it later,” Emma declares, and Regina has to stop herself rolling her eyes. “There’s definitely something weird here.”

“We noticed that,” Regina notes sardonically.

“It’s like a portal, but not quite, a gateway into a kind of… I dunno, a mirror world? Or some kind of hidden dimension,” Emma continues, pointedly ignoring Regina’s snark. “Someone's taken a copy, or a mirror of a piece of the original universe, and built a portal to it."

Regina blinks. "Is that... normal?"

"For there to be a mirror universe snuck into a hidden dimension? Yeah, there's... technically an infinite number of them, I think. I'm not an expert on that stuff, though."

"And the portal?"

"Yeah,  _that_ bit isn't normal at all," Emma says, pursing her lips in thought. "I can't remember the last time I saw something like this. You can manipulate portals if you're clever, but I can’t work out the reason that this one isn't letting you see through—”

“It’s because you’re not an orphan,” Gretel says suddenly from behind them. Regina turns around.

“What?”

“You’re not an orphan, but I am, and Miss Emma is,” Gretel explains, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s why I can see her and you can’t.”

Regina stares at her. “How do you know Emma is an orphan?”

Gretel shrugs. “I just know. It’s obvious when you look at her.”

Regina blinks—and suddenly, a dozen different pieces fall into place: Emma’s longing when she’d looked at Henry, Emma’s _yearning_ , Emma’s intimate knowledge of this little girl’s struggles. It matches perfectly, and the competing whispers in her mind die away as she finds clarity of purpose again. “So if it’s a mirror universe only orphans can see, how do I get through?”

“Uh, you don’t? Regina, we’ll go find another way, any sort of alternate or bubble or mirror universe can be really unpredictable and dangerous—”

“There are probably a number of very confused and lost children on the other side of this barrier, Emma. How do I get through?”

Emma steps back through the invisible interface, reappearing. She looks apprehensive, but she extends her hands towards both Gretel and Regina. “Here. This might work.” Regina takes one hand, Gretel the other. “You sure about this? This might be a one way trip.”

Regina hesitates, considers that _voice_ again—but ignores it. “Let’s go.”

They step over the threshold as one.

 

* * *

 

They don’t notice anything different at first. The network of catwalks and ladders continues on, their state of disrepair become ever more obvious. But they don’t see any sign that they’re onto anything useful for about half an hour, until Gretel points out a white pebble, this one gleaming and polished, directly in their path. Emma picks it up, inspects it closely.

“We’re close,” she declares. “Let’s keep going.”

They do so, and before long they’re descending down a long, steep ramp into a long, darkened corridor, the air thickening and filling with some pungent, nasty scent that has Regina scrunching her nose along the way. Soon the corridor opens up into an improbably cavernous hallway, lined with barred but disappointingly empty cells.

“Probably this is meant to be a prison,” Emma comments as Regina inspects a sets of bars. “Though I don’t think that they imprisoned things with such sharp claws back in the original version,” she adds, motioning at the long, deep gouge marks in the stone walls.

“Whatever’s down here, it won’t be pretty,” Regina muses.

“Yeah. Be alert and watch over the kid, we don’t want to be ambushed by whatever took those kids—”

“Hello?” A thin, high-pitched voice calls out from down the hallway. “Is someone there?”

Regina opens her mouth to call back—but Gretel gets in first.

“Hans?”

A small pause. “Gretel?”

“Hansel!”

They try to hold her back, but before they can Gretel is sprinting across to the other side of the hall, crossing the fifty-yard space before Emma and Regina can catch up to her. The girl falls to her knees in front of an unusually large cell, holding no fewer than a dozen children sitting docile on the floor behind perfectly polished black bars. Gretel reaches out, grabs her brother’s hand even as she cries.

“Shh, Gretel, it’s okay,” Hansel—a straw-haired boy of roughly thirteen—says with a bright-eyed smile. “You don’t need to cry. I found our mother.”

“But I found you,” Gretel says, smiling through her tears, “I was really scared and I didn’t think I would find you but Miss Emma and Miss Regina helped me—”

“Emma and Regina?” Hansel asks, frowning, his eyes still gleaming in the dark. “Who are they?”

“My new friends,” Gretel says, motioning at the two of them. They decide to step closer, to give Gretel and the rest of the imprisoned children a better look at the two of them, but Hansel seems to stare straight through them. “They come from a planet, a _real_ one, and if we're good they might be able to take us away—”

“But why would we want to do that?” Hansel interrupts, and there is something _really_ strange about that child's eyes, Regina thinks, the way they seem to almost glow in the dark—“I told you, I found Mother.”

Gretel stills, her face falls. “What are you talking about?”

“He's talking about me,” a new voice says, low, smooth, soothing and female. Regina spins on her heel, mirroring Emma next to her, to see a dark-haired, middle-aged lady in an ornate purple dress with a broad, sad smile.

“Hello, dear. I'm your Mother.”


	3. Chapter 3

Regina's mouth falls open and she stares in disbelief.

It's been years, it's been _decades_ since she's seen Cora, and seeing her now makes her mind go somewhat blank, overwhelmed with shock, with disbelief that here, in this place, is _Mother_.

“I—I thought you were dead,” she whispers, taking a step forward. Mother just keeps smiling that sad smile of hers, and Regina's heart feels like it's about to burst. “It's really you?”

“It's really me, dear,” Cora croons. Next to her, Emma's mouth is hanging open, and her eyes are bright, so bright as Cora turns to her. “Emma. My darling, how I have _so_ missed you. I am so, _so_ sorry about what you went through in my absence.”

Emma's mouth closes, slowly opens again. “It—it was you? You gave me up?” Emma asks, small and vulnerable and sounding so very, very young. Cora bows her head.

“It was for your best chance,” she murmurs, and Emma chokes on a sob.

Regina frowns a little—there's something about that which isn't _right,_ isn't _correct_ , but her vision has gone hazy with joy and disbelief, her head lightened by the realisation that Mother, her _Mother_ , is here, murmuring soft words of comfort to little Gretel nearby—“How—how did you get here, Mother? Where have you _been_?”

“I fell through a portal, Regina,” Cora says. “You remember that, don't you?”

Regina frowns—but then, as if in response, images flash through her head, vivid and brilliant and replacing her vision whole for a few seconds: a golden orb, a cold metal cube in her hand, a glimpse of stars through a whole in reality, a voice screaming her name—“Yes— _yes,_ I—I think I remember.”

Cora nods with satisfaction. “I've been here ever since, looking after orphans who fell into this same hidden dimension as I did.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Cora replies, and reaches up to place her hand on Regina's cheek. Regina covers it with her own, momentarily closes her eyes. “I just want you to know, though, that I missed you for every second of every day, and I am so, _so_ proud of you, Regina.”

Regina opens her eyes again, keeps her gaze as soft as she can, smiles a little. “I know,” she murmurs as gently as possible. “And I'm sorry, Mother.”

Cora frowns, perturbed. “For what, dear?”

Below, Regina tightens her fist. “For this.”

And she punches Cora square in the jaw.

“ _Regina!”_ someone yells. Regina can't tell who it is, whether it's Emma or Cora— _no._ _Not Cora._

It's like a veil has been lifted, the misleading fog of confusion that had befallen her better senses clearing up at last, and she blinks her eyes clear at last. Not-Cora stumbles backwards, eyes wide with shock as she massages her stricken jaw. “Regina— _what_ —”

“A word of advice, _Mother,_ ” Regina says with as much sweet, sweet menace as it's possible to incorporate into her voice. “That trick might work on _actual_ orphans, but my mother saying she's _proud_ of me? Not _my_ mother.”

Emma's jaw drops, her eyes widen as if she too is seeing clearly at last, as Not-Cora's face twists into a horrible, terrible scowl. “You mean...”

“Whatever this _thing_ is,” Regina says, putting herself protectively between Not-Cora and Gretel, “it isn't anyone's mother.”

Not-Cora simply smiles, and _changes._

Regina blinks.

“Miss Regina?” Gretel says in a high, tremulous voice, clutching tightly to her coat. “What is that?”

Regina had been right on the main thing at least—Not-Cora is most definitely _not Cora_. In fact it isn't even human at all, unless in the far-off future humans will become seven feet fall, gain jet-black fur, the head of an oversized wolf, emerald-green eyes and glowing, six-inch claws for hands.

“Oh, wow,” Emma says, and Regina almost wants to punch her as well, “I guess that explains the marks.”

The creature growls, _growls,_ and all three of them start slowly backing away.

“Miss Swan, if you have any brilliant plans...”

“Just one,” Emma says, as Not-Cora starts advancing on them. “ _Run._ ”

Regina doesn't need a second invitation.

 

* * *

 

The three of them sprint for their lives out of the hallway and back into the network of corridors immediately outside. Not-Cora apparently only knows how to stomp about on its hind legs, so they quickly lose it in the maze.

“But now _we're_ lost too,” Regina points out as she crouches over to regain her breath. “How the hell are we supposed to find the portal again?”

Emma has her hands on her knees and is taking great, heaving breaths, but she manages to point back down the corridor, straight at a tiny white pebble sitting in a doorway. _Oh._

“I've been leaving them ever since we got here,” Gretel says, station life apparently having given her the stamina needed to run from a terrifying half-wolf-half-human without getting tired. “So you can take me out and back to a real planet. You're taking me to a real planet, right?”

Regina smiles and, before she can stop herself, envelops the little girl in a fierce, tight hug. “Of course, dear. Now,” she changes tack, zeroing on Emma, “what on _earth_ is that horrible thing?”

“I'm not sure—but,” she quickly adds, as Regina's glare becomes ever more intense, “I think it's a Syxoc.”

“A what?”

“A Syxoc. It'd explain why it's here in a hidden dimension, they can't survive in the ordinary universe. They read your memories and then use a perception filter to make you feel really intense emotions. Then they eat them.”

“They eat… emotions?”

“Well, no, they eat people, but the emotional energy is what they're actually after. Stuff like yearning and wanting and desire especially.”

“Like the desire for a family and a new life that isn't a steel hellhole in the vacuum of space,” Regina says quietly. “That explains why it likes orphans, at least.”

“Yeah. It's kind of fu—twisted,” Emma quickly covers, glancing sidelong at Gretel. “We've got to get those kids out. Any ideas?”

Regina bites her lip, runs a hand through her air, keenly aware of Emma's eyes intent on her every move. “You said they can only live in this mirror universe?”

“Yeah.”

“So if we could lure it back to the portal...”

It clicks immediately. “That's—that's _brilliant_ , Regina,” Emma says in a rush, standing upright, and Regina is surprised at the warm glow that fills her at the words. She pushes something into Regina's arms—the little device she'd used to pick the locks before. “You go get the kids out, and I'll sort out the Syxoc—”

“Wait— _Emma_ ,” Regina interjects, grabbing Emma's arm through her jacket before she can dart off. “It should be me. I'm the one who broke through her disguise, and I'm just a simple human—”

“You're also a mother,” Emma says, her eyes suddenly feather-soft. “You saw me back there—I'm as much of an orphan as the rest of these kids. No one will miss me if something happens to me, but you… you have Henry. Plus, I'm the one with eleven more lives here.”

Regina stares, _stares_ into Emma's eyes, the sadness, the _loneliness_ she can see reflected back from their blue-green depths, and is seized by this urge, this insane _desire_ to tell Emma she's _wrong—_ but that's exactly what it is, given how little she knows about her. Insane.

“I'll see you at the portal,” Regina says instead.

“Don't wait up for me if you don't.”

 

* * *

 

Regina ignores her.

She's only been waiting ten minutes, having gotten all the children out of their hallway prison and through the portal. They follow quickly and willingly, Not-Cora's thrall having been lifted and leaving them as terrified as any set of young children in this sort of situation would usually be. Little Gretel and her brother Hansel are the last to leave, and Gretel hesitates before she steps out of the mirror world and into the real one.

“What about Miss Emma?” she asks, her brow furrowed.

Regina sighs, and hurries her on, but Gretel hands over the bag of pebbles before she goes.

She knows what she's supposed to do. She knows that Emma really is _nothing_ to her, that she has the children she's rescued to prioritised, her _own son_ back in a far-off time and place to come back to—but she also knows what Henry would think, the increasingly-common disdain that would be written all over his face if he found out that she, at this moment, had chosen to _run_ ; she can just imagine the _disappointment_ she would become even more in his eyes.

And after ten minutes of waiting fretfully by the invisible threshold later, she's getting this horrible twisting feeling, this indescribable _sense_ deep within her bones that something terrible is afoot, that something awful is about to befall her alien companion—

She grits her teeth and, as she'd done hours before upon seeing a fiery crater in her backyard and the unconscious body about to be consumed within, she charges back in.

It doesn't take her long to find the right trail. She doesn't know _how_ she knows it's the right trail, just as she doesn't know how she knows how Emma is in mortal danger. But Emma _is_ in mortal danger, and seemingly moments after she goes back into the labyrinth of corridors and passageways, she finds Emma backed up by the Syxoc into a dead end.

“Why do you fight, Emma?” Not-Cora croons, and Regina has to fight away the mental fog she can feel descending again, has to shake off visions of a young, teenage girl with dirty blonde hair and a torn, dirty old leather jacket—Emma herself, Regina realises. “You could everything you wanted if you just _let go_.”

Emma swallows, shakes her head rapidly, presses her back harder against the wall. “I don't—I don't have a family. I never have.”

“And I could give you one,” Not-Cora murmurs, its claws glowing a fierce yellow as they're raised above Emma's head. She cowers instinctively, evidently still capable of seeing through the perception filter to the danger beyond. “I promise, Emma, I will give you the family you always wanted.”

Regina racks her brain desperately, searches for something to distract the creature, some form of _yearning_ even deeper than that which is driving Emma to her destruction—and in a moment, in an instant of clarity, she finds it.

“And then what?” she asks.

Not-Cora pauses, lowers its claws, and turns, and Regina stares into the defiant, hardened eyes of a little girl who has known nothing but loneliness for her whole life. “Excuse me?”

Regina swallows, tries to keep her thoughts in order by calling up the images of the only thing in her life that truly matters. _Henry._

“You think that there's nothing worse than being alone, don't you?”

“There's _nothing_ worse than being alone,” Emma—no, _not-Emma_ fires back, angry and lost and desperately lonely. “You wouldn't understand.”

Regina takes a deep breath to steady herself, closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she can see not-Emma starting to advance on her. _Yes._

“But I _do_ understand,” Regina implores, “I know what it's like to be rejected and ostracised, and I know what it's like to not be loved. I know what it's like to _yearn_ to be loved.” The vision of young not-Emma is starting to fade, the half-wolf figure of the Syxoc and a stunned Emma behind flashing into view.

“And whatever you might think, _nothing_ compares to the the feelings of a mother who wants the love of her child.” She blinks, and the vision is gone at last, and she sees the Syxoc leering hungrily at her. “So go on. Feed on me.”

The Syxoc rushes forward with a roar, and Regina bolts.

 

* * *

 

She runs flat-out from corridor to corridor, so quickly that she barely has time to get her bearings and check her directions, and she runs down the same corridor more than once on multiple occasions. She loses sight of the Syxoc pretty quickly, but she can hear its stomping nearby—and besides, the point of this is to lure the beast, not escape from it, which means she has to nudge it towards the portal—although she honestly has no idea where that is, having lost the pebble trail long before.

She's just starting to wonder how the hell she's meant to get out of this maze when she accidentally runs full-bodied into Emma charging in the other direction, toppling over so Emma's body is trapped under hers.

“Woah, um—this is kind of forward, Regina,” Emma quips, even though her pupils are dilated and skin is flushed from exertion, which kind of ruins the cool-and-collected effect Emma was presumably going for. Regina rolls her eyes and drags Emma to her feet.

“Are you alright?” she asks, sharper than she probably needs to, though they _are_ technically fleeing from their lives.

“Fine, thanks.” Emma says, then clears her throat. “You, um, saved me again—”

“You can save the grand speech for later. Which way to the portal?”

Emma opens her mouth and, presumably, she's about to describe the way, but she never gets it out because the Syxoc rounds the corner at that moment, stomping towards them with an ear-splitting roar. So instead, Emma grabs Regina's hand and runs as fast as she can.

Regina doesn't even have it in her to complain about being dragged bodily about like so, what with a seven-foot half-wolf monster bearing down on them. And besides which Emma's sense of direction or memory seems reliable enough, as soon they're back on the metal catwalk and up against the invisible threshold. Little Gretel and her brother still there waiting for them.

“Miss Emma! Miss Regina!” she squeals with delight, and makes to greet them with a hug—but Regina holds an arm out, warns her away. Not that she needs the warning, as the Syxoc steps up to the other end of the catwalk at that moment. It grins wolfishly at them—literally, as it turns out—when it sees them standing with hands joined in the dead-centre of the catwalk with apparently no way out.

“The lost Time Lady and the rejected mother with the hidden past,” it growls, raising it claws. Regina gulps, and a tiny part of her wonders whether this plan was so wise. But Emma squeezes her grip tighter, and she holds firm. “Between you two, there's enough yearning for a _hundred_ little orphan children. I'll be feeding off you for decades.”

It's kind of spine-chilling, really, and now Regina is _definitely_ wondering if they should just take that single step backwards into the real world and leave this bizarre emotion-eating wolf-man to its little hidden dimension and its mind games. Which, of course, is when Emma decides to be completely and utterly reckless. And stupid.

“So what are you waiting for, dog-breath?” Emma jibes, and Regina cringes. _Dog-breath?_ _S_ eriously? “Come on, dinner's waiting for you.”

The Syxoc growls—or laughs, Regina can't quite tell—and runs forward on all forwards like the wolf it resembles, using its claws as its front legs. It gets to about twenty feet from Emma and Regina before it dives, sailing through the air, its luminous golden claws ready to embed themselves in their chests. They throw themselves to the floor, cowering under their arms as the Syxoc leaps clean over them, black fur brushing against the top of Regina's head as she screws her eyes shut, a thin sizzling sound filling the air like hot oil on a pan—

And then silence.

Regina opens her eyes again, lifts her head up just as Emma does the same

Above, she can see the portal at last—at least, she can see where the threshold between the two worlds lies, indicated by a thin layer of white mist, a mid-air residue of the once-terrifying creature that had inadvertently tried to pass into a forbidden world.

It's over.

She collapses onto her backside on the cold metal catwalk and rests against the railing, her legs trapped awkwardly underneath her. Really, though, she's too exhausted to care as she feels the adrenaline washing through and out of her, and from the flushed excitement on Emma's face, Regina can tell that she feels the same.

“So,” Emma begins, brushing loose hair away from her eyes and mouth and letting out a breathy, relieved laugh. “That was intense.”

Regina closes her eyes and lets her head fall back onto the railing, allows herself a smile.

“Yes, it was. Although I think it's more than five minutes.”

A brief pause, almost shocked, then—

“Just give me a minute to catch my breath, and I'll take you home.”

 

* * *

 

When the Bug lands—or arrives, or however Regina's meant to describe it—there's a thudding noise that reverberates around the room and shakes the floor. Regina pays it little attention, though, being too occupied with the heated phone call she's currently embroiled it to give it any heed.

“No— _no_ Sidney, I am not _asking._ I am _ordering,”_ she snaps. “You _will_ make those arrangements first thing in the morning and prepare those documents, or you _will_ find a new job.” With that, she hangs up—forcefully, but that's just for show. She knows that Sidney won't dare step out of line on this.

Emma clears her throat. "We're, um, we're here."

"Thank you."

“So how did it go? Did they—”

“All cleared up,” she says, “The city will find either adoptive or foster parents for the children, you have my word on that. I can't promise they'll live perfect lives—but it's the best I can do, and it's better than nothing.”

“Don't I know it,” Emma says with a rueful smile. She moves over, and squeezes Regina's hand above the shoulder. “Thank you. For doing this. It means a lot to me, and it'll mean everything to those kids.”

Regina looks away. “Yes, well. Storybrooke isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than spending their lives lonely and neglected on that metal coffin. All you need to do now is pick them up and drop them off at this time and place,” she says, handing over a hand-written card. “Although they'll most likely be traumatised by the experience of having been under that _thing's_  thrall and frankly their whole lives in general—”

“I'll clean it up. Don't worry, I won't let those kids down.”

Regina looks up again, and the sincerity of Emma's expression alone convinces her. “That's that, then.”

“That's that,” Emma agrees, then shuffles awkwardly from foot to foot. “"So you're not going to call the police? Or the—"

"No calls. Nothing. No one will ever know you were here except Henry and I. You have my word."

"Thank you."

Regina pauses, thinks back to something Emma had said earlier on when she'd gone after the Syxoc alone. “Back there, in the mirror world. You said something about having eleven more lives—”

“Oh, yeah. Um—people like me, we don't really age,” Emma says, ducking her head as if she's embarrassed to admit it, “And when we die we don't really… die. We're filled with this stuff called regeneration energy and it sort of, I dunno, remakes us, I guess. Gives us a new life. ”

Regina raises an eyebrow. “Sounds useful.”

“It is. I mean—that's exactly what I'd just gone through when you found me, so this body is mostly brand new. But when you're still regenerating or just regenerated, you can be killed off for good if something bad happens so—so thank you, again," Emma says softly, glancing up with soft eyes. "For saving me."

"It was my pleasure," Regina says.

There's another silence, this one verging on awkward—then Regina nods at Emma, who is intently fiddling with some random lever on the console beneath her, and turns to leave.

She's just opened the door when Emma speaks up one more time.

"Listen—about you and Henry, if there's anything I can do to help—"

Regina hesitates, looks back—then smiles politely back up at her. “Of course. Say hello to Gretel for me, will you? I'll visit her once she's settled in.”

For a moment, Regina sees a flash of hurt across Emma's face, like she'd taken it as a rejection it hadn't originally intended to be—but it soon disappears. “Sure. Say hi to Henry for me too.”

Regina nods and leaves.


	4. Chapter 4

When she gets inside, Henry is still awake and still loitering downstairs.

"Where'd you go?" he asks brusquely with narrowed eyes. She really ought to chide him on his lack of respect, his ignorance of manners that he very much knows he should have, but she doesn't. She's tried too many times for it to be worthwhile now, particularly because he knows perfectly well what's he doing.

"Just having a talk with Emma Swan about damages to the tree, darling. Nothing important."

He doesn't believe her. "I saw you going into that car. And then you guys just _disappeared_ for hours."

 _Hours_ _?_ Had it really been _that_ long? Emma had promised  _five minutes_ , after all.

"I'm—I'm sorry, dear, I lost track of time."

"What were you guys doing there?"

"I just said, Henry, I was discussing—"

" _No_ , you weren't doing that," he interjects, silencing her as he grows visibly more irate, his eyes welling up with tears. "You're lying again."

"Henry—"

"Why do you do that? Why do you keep _lying?_ "

She opens her mouth to respond, to try and calm him down, to distract, to chide him for talking back to her, to do _something_ —but too late, as he shakes head and charges past her up the stairs.

The sound of the door slamming echoes throughout the house.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't sleep well that night.

She never sleeps well after having an argument with Henry, naturally, and it takes her all of two hours to pick herself off the couch where she'd sunk down after he'd run off, drinking god knows how many glasses of wine and mindlessly letting the sound of late-night television wash over her.

After that, though, she does try and sleep, and usually she does an okay job of it. Tonight, though—

It's like a hidden switch had been flicked, having been buried under cobwebs of memory and worry and the thick dust-coating of day-to-day-life and only coming to light as the result of the previous night's events. It's more than that though; she has wild, unrealistic dreams sometimes—everyone does—but these are more vivid than that, all vibrant colour and distant shapes, fantastical structures inhabited by extraordinarily peoples on some world beyond imagination, all greens and reds and purples and flashes of blonde and gold, blonde and gold—

She wakes up when she realises that.

It's Emma's doing, she knows. That damned alien had planted the seed in ground which had been fertile but left fallow for a long, long time, and now it's there Regina knows it'll only grow and grow. And yes, Regina could easily be irresponsible and careless like she'd been as a child, cavorting around the farm with a care in the universe—

But she _does_  have a care in the world now. She has a life, she has an important job running a city of just under a million people, she has responsibilities that she will not walk away from. Above all, she has a son.

Even if he seems loath to admit it these days.

The upshot is that when she gets out of bed at six thirty and inspects herself in the mirror, her messy hair, bloodshot eyes and awful headache instantly betray how much her stupid dreams had robbed her of valuable sleep.

She sighs and heads downstairs, tugging on a dressing gown—and finds, to her surprise, that Henry is waiting for her, head buried in the pantry.

"Oh," he lets out when he looks up and sees her—though he immediately looks away again. "I was, um, looking for cereal."

"Here." She opens another cupboard and pulls out an unopened box of cornflakes. "Would you like them with milk?"

He clears his throat, keeps on looking down at his hands and away from her. "Um, yes please."

He's guilty, she can tell. He's guilty about how last night had gone because he's _always_  guilty the morning after, because at some point during the night, the heated rush of anger, the betrayal that she assumes courses through him fades. And when it does, he remembers that she really is his mother, is reminded of that at some deep, subconscious level built into him from before he could even say his own name.

But he doesn't apologise. He's never apologised, because _she_ hasn't ever apologised for being who she is, for being his actual mother and _not_ being the mother he _truly_ wants, and so the anger doesn't go away. It fades and dives deep down inside, but it doesn't go away, and before long it rises to the surface again, and the whole cycle begins anew.

She sighs to herself, and prepares his breakfast—cereal, avocado spread on toast, orange juice—while he sits silently behind her. She has this, at least. Despite everything else, she has—

"So did Emma show you her spaceship?" he asks suddenly.

She breathes in sharply, momentarily closes her eyes and stills her hands—but she can't lie about this. Not again. "She did."

"Oh. That's—that's really cool," he says, and she almost smiles at the excitement rising in his voice—excitement she hasn't heard in her presence in more than a fortnight. "Did she take you anywhere?"

"She showed me a place, yes."

"What was it like?"

She takes a moment, recalls the images of the triple star, the swirling storms, the pinpricks of activity from the mining colony—and then the multiracial, multispecies throng on the station, the hope in Gretel's eyes when she'd talked about _real planets_ , the rush of adrenaline as she'd ran from the Syxoc—"Extraordinary," she murmurs, as she places the bowl of cereal in front of him. "And beautiful, I suppose, in parts. In its own way."

"Wow," he breathes out, his eyes bright and looking at her—past her, to the wondrous possibilities beyond. "I wish I could have gone."

She stops for a moment. _About you and Henry, if there's anything I can do—_

But no. She wouldn't be doing that for Henry, though he would undoubtedly love it. She'd be doing it for herself, for seeing him smile around her again.

"We were only there a few hours, and we spent most of it running around. You wouldn't have seen very much," she says.

"Yeah—but, like, aliens and other worlds and stuff. How many people get to see that?"

"Not many," she admits. "But Miss Swan is gone now, and she doesn't seem the kind to stay around one place for too long."

His shoulders slump a little— _that_  he can't argue with. "If she comes back, though..."

Regina hesitates a moment—but quickly falls to the hopefulness in her son's face.

"We'll see, sweetheart. Now eat up, you don't want it to get soggy."

 

* * *

 

She tries her best to put it out of the mind for the rest of the day. She tries very hard, in fact.

But she doesn't even get inside the front door of Town Hall without having no fewer than four microphones shoved in her face.

"Mayor Mills, any comment on the explosion last night?" one reporter yells, as if she can't hear him from three feet away.

"The reports of explosions were incorrect," she says smoothly. "The sound was merely a few teenagers setting off contraband fireworks."

Alas, that isn't enough to mollify them. "But multiple witnesses reported a loud band and stated that they saw a large fire near Mifflin Street—"

"Seeing that I _live_ on Mifflin Street, I can confirm that the fire was contained completely within private property and presented no danger to anyone, and so can Chief Hunter." He couldn't, of course, but one or two calls would change that. There was value in keeping the top cop terrified of you.

“Have you made any progress on the investigations into the missing five?” one particularly insistent reporter shouts in her face, and _that_ question is not so easily dismissed, because she hasn’t.

"The police are doing everything in their power to find them and bring them home,” Regina says smoothly. “Now if you'll excuse me..."

After that, though, she _does_ do a reasonable job of staying focused. Her impromptu press gaggle is enough to quell the inquiries to the point where she can hand them off to a secretary, and soon she finds herself sinking into the everyday work of running a fairly unremarkable, medium-sized city on the Atlantic coast.

She has meetings, she reads reports, she makes critical calls, only some of which involve yelling. For the most part, they're related to the string of odd disappearances that have been plaguing the city, but given that she is not actually the police, those are mostly limited to reassuring the worried and the related that all will be well.

She's finding it increasingly difficult to believe her own words, though, as this particular saga had gone on for some time now, and the tally of missing people now stands at five, all of whom had simply vanished without the slightest clue as to what had happened to them or why. There are still obvious no connections between any of them, none of them had been involved in anything untoward, and no leads had been uncovered—actual leads, anyway, as opposed to charlatans and glory hunters. As best as anyone could tell, they'd simply been going about their daily lives when they'd been whisked into thin air without leave any trace behind.

The police are, to put it kindly, totally flummoxed, and beyond that there isn't really anything she can do about it other than put on an encouraging smile. So that's what she does.

Apart from that, she generally busies herself with the tangible and the real and spends no time on daydreams of all of time and space. No time at all.

She does make progress on one other important item, though, vaguely related to said daydreams: the children relocated from the station. All have been placed with various adoption agencies and, weird paperwork and even weirder first impressions due to culture shock aside, Regina is optimistic as she reads the first reports. All things considered, she's pleasantly surprised that it's even gotten to this stage, as she wasn't entirely sure that Emma would actually follow through. She makes a note to thank the alien when she sees her again—

Which, as it turns out, is right then and there.

"Wow, you really work here?"

She blinks and looks up, startled, at the blonde woman who had turned up completely unannounced right in the middle of her office.

"What the hell—"

Emma pouts. "Really, Regina? Not even a ‘hi, Emma, how are you'?"

"We aren't friends, Miss Swan, in case you hadn't noticed," Regina bites back—though she regrets it a little when she sees a flash of hurt across Emma's face. "What are you doing here?"

"I was just checking up on you, that's all," Emma says, sounding a little defensive. Regina sighs.

"You might be an alien—"

"Time Lady."

Regina blinks. "Excuse me?"

"I'm a Time Lady. I mean, _technically_ I'm not, because I never passed the tests—I never _did_  the tests, because I didn't grow up on Gallifrey, but whenever I go to places people call me a Time Lady, so yeah. That's what I am."

Regina had understood maybe a tenth of that at best, but—"In any case. You might be an alien, but I'm perfectly capable of living my own life without your interference. You've already cost me my apple tree, in case you've forgotten."

Emma fiddles nervously with her fingers. "I—I know. I still need to make that up to you."

Regina sighs again—she knows full well what Emma probably has in mind for _making up to her_.

"You still haven't answered my question. Why are you here?"

"I have! I said, I'm just checking—"

"—Up on me. So you've said." Regina sighs. "The children are fine, if that's what you're worried about."

"They'll be more than fine. I followed through on that, you don't need to worry about them."

Regina is curious as to how Emma is so sure, but figures it's time-travel-related somehow and decides not to pursue it further. "So why are you here? If it's about whether I called the police—"

"No, I know you didn't, I checked," Emma says quickly, before looking down at her hands and kicking her heels a little. "I, uh, I wanted to thank you for that, actually."

"Oh. Well—yes, I didn't do that." Regina pauses for a moment, looks at Emma more carefully. "You never explained why that was so important to you."

Emma shrugs. "It's a long story. I did some stuff, stuff went wrong, people came after me, I had to run. Have to run," she amends. "I need to stay off-grid for as long as I can until I shake them off, keep off any lists or anything like that. I've already lost one regeneration to these guys."

Regina frowns. "There's... alien surveillance on this world?"

"More than on most, actually. But I know this place pretty well, so it’s a good place to go if I’m desperate, which I was. I can hide here if I'm careful."

"And how would they know that it's actually _you_?"

"They would know," Emma says simply, an ominous a non-answer as Regina thinks she's ever heard.

"Oh. Well, you can trust me not to divulge your secret," Regina says, and means it too. Beyond anything else, catching the attention of alien surveillance sounds... unwise.

"Thank you," Emma says simply, sincerely, and in that moment, Regina looks at her and sees gratitude written all over her face, gratitude and— _surprise?_

"Did you... did you think I would?" Regina asks, a little taken aback.

Emma shrugs, which Regina takes as a yes.

"I gave you my word, and I keep my promises."

"People have said that before," Emma mumbles, now looking resolutely at her own feet.

"I am not _people_ , Emma."

Emma's eyes snap up to Regina's, wide and bright, and a slow smile appears on her face.

"No, you really aren't," she says softly. She then clears her throat, shifts her feet a little, before finally pulling up a chair and plopping herself down. "Anyway. Thanks. How's, um, how's Henry?"

Regina leans back a little in her seat, frowning. her instinct, her immediate and rational impulse is to tell Emma that it's none of her business, it's strictly between her and her son who seems permanently angry at her, who can barely look her in the eye; between her and her son, when she cherishes even the slightest bit of civility between them—

"He's fine," Regina says quietly. "He's—he's the same as he usually is."

"Oh." Emma bites her lip, shuffles on the chair a little—Regina can tell just how much she's fighting her own curiosity right now. "That's—that's, um—"

"Don't say it's good, Miss Swan," Regina says, some of the exhaustion that she usually holds at bay creeping into her voice. "It isn't."

"I wasn't gonna say that," Emma protests gently. "I can tell you guys aren't having a great time right now."

"You met him for all of two minutes," Regina points out.

"I told you, I've seen kids who are mad when they find out they were adopted, I know what it looks like."

"Mm, were those children angry because of adoption, or angry because they had to live a life of neglect in a metal cage suspended above a gas giant?"

Emma frowns. "Didn't I tell you that I grew up here like twice already? Actually—this city is in Maine, in the United States, right?" she asks, then looks around the room as if Regina's office would naturally have a _hello, you_ _are in Maine_  sign casually hanging from one of the walls. There isn't, obviously, but somehow Emma manages to satisfy herself about the answer because she shrugs and returns her attention to Regina. "I was actually found by the side of a highway upstate, probably less than a hundred miles from this place."

Regina feels yet another a little chink of her stubborn, standoffish armour fall away. "You mean... your parents just abandoned you by the roadside? But they aren't even from this world," she points out, remembering what Emma had told her about  _Gallifrey_ and inferring the rest.

"Right," Emma says, laughing bitterly—and to Regina's ears, the sound is gratingly harsh when set against the usual summery demeanour that Emma had presented at nearly all other times. "They flew here, dropped their newborn Time Lady kid in a baby blanket by the road, set off again. Never heard from them since, no idea who they even are."

"Oh," Regina replies , her eyes a little wide—then regrets it, feels she  _has_ to say more than that. She had at least assumed that Emma's parents had, well, _died_ , not simply abandoned her so callously. "That's—that's really quite horrible, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Emma says with a shrug, looking down at her feet in a way that suggests to Regina that it isn't actually totally okay. "It just means that for the first few years of my life I was just another abandoned kid, y'know? So I know about all that other stuff that your kid would have been through if you hadn't adopted him—foster parents, group homes, all that stuff. But even then, the adopted kids still always seemed to get mad when they found out about it."

"He isn't mad because of that. It's—there's more to it than just that." Regina says quietly.

"There always is," Emma says simply, and again Regina thinks she can see Emma's usual effervescent persona drop, replaced by something else, something more wizened, something older.

Regina pauses briefly, loses herself in thought for a second. "He was happier this morning. You made quite an impression."

Emma quickly brightens. "Did I? That's good. I'd—it'd be nice if you guys are happy. I'd want that."

Regina stares, and stares, mouth open and slightly lost for words for a moment—"That's—thank you. That's very kind."

"It's my pleasure. So, what's going on?"

"Work." Which is what she gets back to now, pen in hand and eyes back down onto the page. Emma keeps talking, though.

"Well, yeah, I can see that from the office. Anything special going on? Other than those kids, I mean."

Regina gives her a brief, sharp look. "If you call the disappearance of five people _special_ , yes."

"Oh." Emma looks taken aback by the answer, obviously not expecting her attempt to make conversation to rebound so heavily. "That's... that's bad. Have you had any luck finding them?"

"That's up to the police, not me. My job is to reassure everyone that everything is under control."

"And is it?"

Regina gives her another glare, this one equal parts _what do you think_ and _don't ask stupid questions_. Emma seems to understand, though.

"Right." She shifts herself back in the seat, clears her throat. "You know, I find people for a living. If you need any help—"

"And here I thought you didn't want to talk to the police," Regina cut across sardonically.

Emma's shoulders slump a little, which causes an uncomfortable pang in Regina's chest—she hadn't meant to be harsh, only firm.

"Right," Emma mumbles quietly, looking down at her hands—then abruptly, she stands up, and starts backing towards the door. "Well, um, I'll see you... whenever I see you, I guess."

Regina puts her pen down and leans back so she can meet Emma's eye properly. "Will you, though? For Henry's sake, I mean," she adds quickly.

Emma pauses halfway to the door, stops, visibly thinks—then smiles that small, bright smile that Regina is starting to become keenly familiar with.

"Yeah. I'll come back, I promise. I'll see you guys soon."

With that, Emma is gone.

 

* * *

 

That afternoon when she drives home, there's tempting images of distant worlds flashing through her mind—but now there's more than just vague daydreams of impossibility there. There's echoes of soft laughter and bright, fragile smiles as a blonde woman in a red leather jacket leads Regina and her son down a starlit road, a _promise_.

Part of her wonders what it would be like, really. To run. To do what she'd dreamed of so long ago. To forget about all the things Mother had taught her and her comfortable, warm, solid life here on the ground and just run and run with Emma Swan—

But only part.

By the time she gets home and opens the door, she's already cleared her mind of the far-off daydreams. Henry should already be home and upstairs doing homework, which means resigning herself to another four or five hours of silence before sleep—

"Mom?"

Regina stops, completely stops, for a moment—then composes herself, rearranging her friends into a welcoming smile at her son loitering at the base of the stairs. "Hello, dear. Aren't you meant to be doing homework?"

"I finished it," Henry says shortly, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if unable to settle. "Did you see Emma today?"

 _Oh_. So this is why he had come down to talk to her—not because of _her_ at all. But still, she'll take what she can get.

"I did, yes. She wanted to check that we hadn't called the police."

"Oh. Did you?" he asks bluntly—almost accusingly, and Regina has to remind himself that he's still just ten years old, and probably not aware of the way her stomach tightens when he sounds like that, when he _mistrusts_  her like that.

"No, Henry. I promised her I wouldn't."

His eyes widen, almost as if in _surprise_ —before his expression loosens, and Regina breathes easier again.

"Will she come back?" he asks.

Regina hesitates. Emma had promised, but—

"She promised, but... maybe. I'm not sure, honey."

"Okay," he says softly, before heading back up the stairs.

 

* * *

 

That day is the last time she sees Emma for a while.

She isn't enormously surprised by this—Emma had struck her as a particularly flighty type, not liable to stick around one place for awfully long even if she didn't have a bigger-on-the-inside car that could teleport around all of time and space.

Even so, she's disappointed by this turn of events. Disappointed enough that each night she glances out her window at the still-unfilled crater that had once been her beloved tree and sees that the hideous off-yellow of Emma's Bug hasn't reappeared. Disappointed that she catches no sight or sign of Emma bouncing nervously on her heels and giving small fragile smiles as Regina looks out on the universe Emma could offer her in wonder.

Most of all, she’s disappointed that _Henry_  is realising this too even as he clings onto hope and wonder that Emma will come back and show him the universe. She'd told him exactly what going into space with Emma had been like two nights after Emma's first arrival, shared the details of her adventure on New Prospect, described the stunning sights of the triple star system and the impossibly varied coterie of aliens she'd seen on the station, and she'd even taken him to meet little Gretel and her brother—they're settling in nicely now, adaptability apparently being a quality that comes naturally to people who've spent their life on a mining platform.

It's a choice she initially savours as his eyes brighten and he smiles, really smiles, at her for the first time in weeks, but she comes to regret it, because it gives him hope.

It's like how Mother had always warned her—hope is the most dangerous force in the universe, particularly in the hands of those who know how to use it, and Regina had been inadvertently masterful with it. And as much as she tries to explain that no, Emma is probably long gone and far, far away; and no, Emma is probably not coming back, he refuses to believe her.

He refuses to believe her like he refuses to believe so many other things she's told him over the last six weeks and more. To him, this is just another thing she's hiding from him, another thing she's lying to him about, another piece of proof that she's not his real mother, she's _evil_ —

"I'm—I'm what?" she stammers, stunned by the hammer-blow his words had inflicted upon her.

"You're _evil_ ," he hisses at her again, tears flowing freely down his face. "If you weren't you wouldn't _lie_  all the time about  _everything_."

There's silence, broken only by Henry's uneven sniffling.

"Henry," Regina says eventually, her voice shaking even on those two syllables. "I don't know where you learned to talk like this, but it isn't acceptable—"

She never finishes the sentence, though, because Henry has already charged up the stairs and into his room. As he always does.

Regina stands for a moment, swaying against the emotional currents buffeting her—before she falls, crumpling to the ground as her back hits the wall behind her, curling her knees into her chest and resing her forehead on her folded arms.

She can't keep doing this. She can't keep fighting like this, not when it's her own son she's fighting with, not like this. All she wants—the _only_  thing she wants—is for him to _try_  and forgive her and at least give her a sign that things could be _better_. In lieu of that, though, she just sits there, dead still, empty and lost and silent—at least until there's a light tapping on the door.

She looks up, her cheeks moist and her eyes narrowed. "Who is it?"

"It's me," a woman's voice says from the other side. "Um—I mean, it's Emma Swan. This is Regina Mills's house, right? I—um, I got lost, and I wasn't sure—oh."

Regina had opened the door as Emma had been stammering nervously, and Emma had fallen silent immediately once she had. Emma looks roughly the same as the last time Regina had seen her, save for the open-mouthed surprise on her face at Regina's state.

"Hi. Um, are you—"

"A month," Regina says over her, and Emma flinches.

"Yeah. I'm sorry, the Bug is still a bit unreliable right now—"

"A _month_ ," Regina hisses. "You promised me that you'd be back and then you run off and you leave us for a _month_ —"

"Well, I'm back now, aren't I?" Emma points out, frowning, stepping forward so she's almost in Regina's personal space. "Regina, seriously, what's wrong?"

Regina wipes her eyes, bats Emma's hand away when she tries to place it on Regina's arm. " _Don't_. Don't even—you can't just make _promises_ to Henry and I then just _run off_ —"

"Hey," Emma cuts her off softly, and before Regina knows it Emma's arms are wrapped gently—and a little clumsily—around her body. Regina stiffens a little, then relaxes, letting her head fall onto Emma's shoulder. "I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd be that long. And I don't remember making any promises to Henry."

Regina snorts, then disentangles herself. "Tell that to him."

"I will if I have to. He's a lucky kid, having everything you've given to him," Emma says seriously, then pauses momentarily. "Is that's what's wrong? You guys had a fight?"

Regina nods jerkily, rubs her eyes once more. "It's—we had a talk, yes. But it's nothing unmanageable, even if he did call me an evil liar."

A beat. "You're kidding, right?"

"Do you seriously think I'd joke about something like this?" Regina half-snaps, but remembers herself. "But like I said, it's nothing—"

" _Nothing_ —" Emma repeats in disbelief, then cuts herself off with a sharp exhalation. "Come on. Let's go up to see him."

And true to her word, Emma immediately marches past a briefly stunned Regina into the house.

"What the hell—Miss Swan, this is my _house_."

"Yeah, and you deserve to be happy in it."

"But this is—this is _out of line_ , Emma—"

Emma stops at the base of the stairs, looks at her with pity—no. Not pity. Understanding. "Look. If you don't want me to go up, I won't. But you were in pieces just now, and I—I don't like seeing that, okay?" Emma says, concluding on a slightly quieter, more plaintive note.

It's almost enough for Regina to give in immediately, but—"This is between me and my son. We're the ones who will have to fix this in the end."

"I know, but I—I'm guessing I didn't help, taking so long to come back when you probably told him that I would," Emma points out, taking Regina's wrist, her fingertips brushing softly over the underside. "But it's your choice, Regina. He's your son, not mine."

Regina stares. Watches and searches for any sign of a trick or a trap—but there's nothing; Emma is being absolutely sincere, and if Regina wanted she could shake her head, show Emma to the door and out of her and Henry's life permanently—or, instead, she could invite her in, and open the door to god only knows where.

It's not a hard choice in the end.

"Alright. Follow me."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting with this next subplot and continuing throughout the remainder, violence and particularly gun usage will be a part of this story. Generally that violence won't be especially graphic, though.

A few seconds later, the two of them are outside the door to Henry's bedroom.

"Henry?"

There's no response—not that Regina is expecting one, of course. She knocks again.

"Henry, there's someone here to see you. Someone special."

Again she gets nothing in return, and she's starting to wonder if she'll be able to get through to Henry tonight at all—but then there's a stilted but inquisitive, "Who is it?"

Regina opens her mouth to reply—but the words catch in her throat and stay there. Not thirty minutes ago she'd been telling Henry in no uncertain terms that Emma had gone and would not be coming back, promises or not, and now—

"Henry, it's Emma," Emma says, giving Regina a quick sidelong glance as if aware of why Regina had hesitated and covering, "I'm back."

A few more seconds' pause—then there's the soft sound of socked feet padding their way to the door, and the click of a latch as it opens enough for two wide, curious eyes to appear.

"It's—it's you? You're really back?" he asks, staring at Emma.

Emma smiles, waves. "Hi, kid. Sorry I took so long."

"It's been, like, a month."

Emma winces. "Yeah. I—um, I got sidetracked. It's kind of a long story."

"Oh," Henry says, and Regina can tell from that single word alone that Henry is already wondering what exactly that long story could be. "My mo—Regina said you weren't coming back."

Regina had almost visibly recoiled at Henry's correction—but she hadn't, because Emma had instead.

"Yeah, um—about that," Emma says, "Can I talk to you for a bit?"

Henry looks like he's just won the lottery. "Sure," he says brightly, bouncing back inside the bedroom and plopping down on his bed, Emma following after him.

"So you really have a time machine?" he starts excitably. "And you can go anywhere in the universe with it?"

Emma gives him a quick smile and a laugh. "Yeah. And I'll let you see it after this—if your mom lets me, of course," she quickly adds, glancing quickly at Regina standing half-in half-out of the doorway. "But first I want to talk to you about your mom."

Henry's expression falls. "Oh. What about?"

"She said you guys had an argument tonight."

Henry shoots Regina a quick, furious glare, then looks down at his lap, kicks his feet out petulantly. "Maybe."

"She looked pretty upset by it. You didn't say mean stuff to her, did you?"

Henry kicks out one of his legs again, then mumbles something so low that Regina can't hear him. Emma can, though, and must have found it bad, because she inhales sharply and flinches.

"Henry, that's—your mom was crying when I arrived, you know?" Emma says softly, and Regina's heart aches at how easily Henry accepts this tenderness from a woman he barely knows. "You don't want to make your mom cry, right?"

"No," he mutters. "But she kept lying," he protests, looking up at Emma. "Like she lied about you coming back."

Emma thins her lips, purses them slightly. "Why do you think she was lying?"

"Because you promised. And told me you promised, but then she kept saying that you wouldn't come back."

"But Regina didn't know that," Emma points out. "I meant to come back way sooner, but stuff got in the way. She must have assumed that I wasn't coming back."

"You wouldn't do that," Henry asserts, and Regina hears another sharp intake of breath from Emma. "So she must have lied about it, like she lied about me being adopted."

Emma sighs audibly, licks her lips in thought. "Henry, you know—aliens like us, we have a—a superpower."

Henry furrows his brow and narrows his eyes, a gesture halfway between scepticism and curiosity. "A superpower?"

"Yeah. For me, it's that I can tell when people are lying."

"Really?"

"Really. And I don't think your mom is lying about this, I really don't."

Henry doesn't answer, just keeps staring at Emma with that crease between his eyebrows.

"And I know you don't believe her right now, but—" Emma holds out her hand, an offering. "You believe me, right, Henry?"

Another second's hesitation—then the indecision on Henry's face breaks, and he takes the offered hand. Emma smiles—beams, really—and clasps it quickly before letting it go, bumping Henry's shoulder companionably with her own and standing up.

"Now, d'you want to see my time machine?"

Henry nods and jumps to the balls of his feet immediately, and within seconds is racing downstairs so fast Regina has to quickly move out of the way lest she gets bowled over. Emma is slower to leave, and when she does she pauses briefly in the doorway, standing so close that her blonde curls brush against Regina's shoulder, brushing her fingertips over one of Regina's crossed forearms.

"Was that okay?" she asks quietly, and Regina hears the unspoken _are you okay_  beneath it.

She takes in a deep breath and nods. "Yes. Thank you."

The hand on Regina's arm tightens momentarily, then Emma moves away, following her son down the stairs. Regina lingers a little longer, spends a moment looking around the room—before switching off the light and shutting the door behind her.

 

* * *

 

Henry's reaction to the interior of Emma's Bug is, predictably, much more exuberant than hers had been. It's a marvel just watching him rush around the orange-lit room—albeit carefully, as it's no less messy than last time—excitably inspecting every item, every metal panel, every flashing light, every screen with esoteric symbols on it and every switch on the console.

When Regina comes in, she just stands in the doorway for a good half-minute or so, loitering with a distant smile on her face. She watches Emma show him around, enjoying the sight of  his unrestrained delight, his high, infectious laughter, aching that it isn't herself that's causing it.

"What does this do?" he asks Emma, jabbing a finger at one particularly large metal lever dotted with blinking green lights, as Regina watches his excitement with a fond, distant smile—she can’t help herself, really.

"It's, um, the throttle, I guess,” Emma attempts by way of explanation. “It makes the whole thing move."

"Very specific," Regina comments as she joins them next to the central console.

Emma juts her chin out, pouts a little.

"I don't know how the whole thing works, okay? It's too complicated, and half the time it fixes itself anyway."

Regina stares. "You have a time machine, and you have no idea how it works?"

Emma's pout only grows. "I told you, I never passed the tests."

"So they just... gave you a time machine?"

Emma shifts her feet, looks down at them. "They, uh, didn't. I, um, I stole it. But I had a good reason! It was the only way I could get off-world," Emma protests.

Regina just pinches the bridge of her nose. "That explains why you're on the run."

Emma juts her jaw out, looks roughly twelve. "No it doesn't—okay, it does a  _bit_ , but not completely. It was a long time ago! I know for a  _fact_ that there's another Time Lord who stole one of these things, I don't see half of Gallifrey going after _him_."

Regina just rolls her eyes.

"So can we go somewhere?" Henry asks, having spent the exchange poring over every single switch, knob and button on the console. "Like, now?"

Emma's eyes widen, darting between Regina and Henry. "I mean, sure, we can go anywhere."

"Anywhere?" Henry's voice has quietened, but he's still visibly buzzing with excitement, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. "We can go anywhere?"

Emma smiles down at him. "Anywhere. If your mom is okay with that, of course," Emma adds hastily, glancing at Regina.

Regina blinks, her mouth opens a little in slight surprise. She had wondered if this moment would come, of course, maybe idly wished for it; but actually being presented with the whole universe _here and now_  for her taking is a very different story.

She know what Mother would say. Mother would rebuke her from running away from her duties like so—but then again, Mother never knew about a machine like this and a person like Emma, fortunately.

"Can we, mom?" Henry asks, looking up with her with no anger, no betrayal, nothing but the brightness of hope in his eyes. He grabs her hand, and she swallows. "Please?"

She looks at him for a second, open and starry-eyed and _her son_  for the first time in two months, and she smiles, running a hand through his hairline with her free, trembling hand.

"Of course, corázon. Whatever you want."

He beams, and wraps his arms tight around her midriff. For a moment she doesn't react, she just stands there with her arms still half-outstretched—before she sinks into the hug, slowly rocking him from side to side and resting her cheek on the crown on his head.

She closes her eyes too, but before she does, she gets a glimpse of that unveiled longing on Emma's face once again.

 

* * *

 

"So what do you want to see, kid?"

Henry rocks back on forth on his feet, bites his lip. It's like his excitement is too much for him to even express, spilling out uncontrolled in little gestures—and it's contagious, apparently, because Emma looks exactly the same. She places her hand on Henry's shoulder, squeezing slightly.

"I dunno," Henry says. "Where do you think?"

"Up to you. Here, let me show you—" She grabs his hand, placing it on a small, white half-globe on the console. "Close your eyes."

"What does this do?" Henry asks as he does so.

"It tells the machine where you want to go. Just think about what you'd like to see and it'll—"

She stops, as there's a low, reverberating thud that resounds through the room, and a sharp shudder upsets Regina's balance and sends her grasping for a metal railing surrounding the console. She'd have fallen to the floor if not for two strong, firm hands grabbing her waist and holding her steady as she slowly gets to her feet. It takes her a second or two of blinking to realise that it's Emma, not Henry, helping her up.

"Mom?" Henry asks, peering over with a worried frown, his smaller frame having helped him keep his balance. "Are you okay?"

Regina straightens out her dress, composes a smile for him. "Fine, dear." She turns to Emma who is still standing right next to her, gives her a glare. "What the hell was that?"

Emma gives a small smile. "That was us arriving. I didn't expect it to work that quickly. Come on, let's see where we are."

With that, she offers Regina an open hand, and waits. Regina doesn't react immediately, hesitates, looks down at it—but then she looks up at Emma's face, at Henry waiting behind her, sees two pairs of bright, wide, hopeful eyes. She takes the hand, and lets Emma lead her towards the door, breathing out and letting herself smile.

She doesn't fail to notice, though, that Henry takes Emma's other hand, not her own, as they step out into dazzling sunlight—and fierce, bitter cold. So much so that they all immediately duck back inside, slamming the door shut behind them. Regina turns to Emma.

"Please tell me you have a wardrobe."

Emma nods, already breathing warmth into her hands. "Upstairs, third door on the right. I think you better dress warm."

It's probably the most obvious advice Regina's ever heard.

 

* * *

 

About fifteen minutes later and now appropriately clothed, Regina blinks against the unusually bright sun, shields her eyes with her hand. "Where are we?"

“Alpania,” Emma says. “Little backwater colony not far from Earth. I first came here because some snowman tried to hide from a fraud charge here. I tracked it down then basically spent the rest of the month on this place, it's really pretty.”

Regina certainly can’t argue with that, although the _backwater_ description turns out to be a little harsh, as Emma later explains. One of the first habitable planets to be found in the initial wave of human solar expansion, it had given rise to a small, fledgling colony that lived mostly on tourism—even centuries into the future, people apparently still really like skiing and mountain hiking, and would put up with the otherwise harsh climate and unforgiving terrain to get it. And from here, way above the treeline, with majestic, pyramidal peaks piercing the midnight-blue sky all around them, and stretches of deep green alpine forest dotted with little village lights below, Regina can see the appeal.

“It’s a hard place to get to, though, and even harder to land anything bigger than the Bug. Basically the whole planet is mountains or oceans, literally no flat land at all,” Emma explains. “So once people found better planets, this place just sort of got… skipped by. Which is weird, though, when you think how many people go skiing on the Alps back on Earth.”

Henry eyes her curiously. “How do you know so much about Earth? Did you know any humans before us?”

Emma’s eyes widen a little, as if she’d been caught inadvertently in an awkward corner that she hadn’t wanted to be in—apparently the information divulged to Regina is for Regina's sake alone, and not for Henry's. Regina herself isn't quite sure what to make of that, frankly, but Emma soon recovers, clapping Henry on the back with a smile. “Yeah, I lived there for a bit a while back. Dated a human, actually. It didn’t work out.”

“Oh. So, like, do you know all the places to see on Earth? Because I always want to travel but mom always says she’s too busy with work and stuff.”

Emma laughs. “Yeah, I’ve seen good stuff on Earth. We don’t want to spend too much time on any one planet, though, not when we have the whole universe—Regina?”

She glances sidelong with a frown at Regina, who had been breathing ever more harshly into her shaking hands, having gone as stiff—not to mention as colourless, a blueish sort of pale far removed from her usual rich olive complexion—as a metal pole.

“Mom?” Henry, who Regina had made absolutely sure was suitably clothed in three layers of jackets, a woollen beanie and matching scarf upon seeing just how _cold_ it is here, looks up at her with concern—the first time he’s genuinely done so in weeks. “Are you cold?”

“It’s okay, Henry,” Regina reassures with an unconvincing smile. She herself is wearing her warmest winter coat and then some, but she suspects that the temperature is single digits at best. She stares at Emma, who is just in her usual jacket with nothing but a cheap beanie and a black coat pulled over and not even buttoned, revealing a heavy belt full of various odds and ends that Regina hadn’t recognised.

Except for the pistol holster, of course, but Regina had promptly taken possession of that. Not because she thinks Emma will be any sort of _danger_ to them, but some instinct, some voice with roots deep in her subconscious says that the _rest_ of the universe doesn’t deserve similar benefit of the doubt. 

Strangely, she’s sure that voice is female.

Either way, Regina wants to be safe as well as sure, and she doesn't put much faith in that buzzing lockpicking device of Emma's as a means of self-defence. Anyway. Emma had seemed understanding and unbothered by Regina’s demand—and is reacting similarly now to what Regina would call _extreme_ cold. “How the hell are you not freezing?”

“Good genes?” Emma offers unhelpfully, though on closer inspection her cheeks are a little pink and she’s rubbing her gloved hands, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet and trampling the soft snow. It’s an oddly endearing sight, but one that makes Regina wonder whether Emma is actually any older, or more mature, than the average fifteen-year-old. Or whatever the Time Lady equivalent is. “It’ll be a bit warmer where we’re going. And less windy.”

“I look forward to it,” Regina quips as sardonically as she can given that she’s pretty sure she’ll get frostbite soon.

Emma turns out to be right, though, as their their actual destination is in a little hidden cave about fifty feet below the summit of the mountain they’d landed on. While it’s not exactly _warm_ inside by any stretch of the imagination, the cold loses its sharp sting and the biting wind dies away—and besides, they’re too distracted by what’s actually inside the cave to care about the weather.

“This is _amazing_ ,” Henry exclaims, and Regina can't exactly disagree. “Mom, _look!_ ”

Regina does look—all around them, stretching right up to the roof fifteen feet above, are intricate, sculpted structures of ice glittering in every imaginable hue of blue and purple. They don't conform to any particular consistent shape, rather undulating organically around and around, giant spirals and shaped columns bent into shapes unlike anything Regina has seen before.

“How do they make them?” Henry asks, dancing around one particularly tall one to take it in from all sides.

“They don't. These were found here when people arrived. They grow back, apparently, so go ahead and look around.”

Henry does so, clambering up and over and around and around, laughing along with Emma as he poses for photos with her. Regina is the one who takes them, of course, ordering them this way and that to align them at just the right angles to catch the gleaming light reflected off the sparkling ice crystals. She doesn't join them on their little climbing trips up and down the structures, though; for one, it doesn't look entirely safe—certainly not for her high heels—and she feels more than a little apprehension about watching Henry cavort about like so, even if she can't help but smile at his obvious delight.

“Henry, careful!” she warns after he jumps off one precarious-looking ice ledge and lands cat-like on the ground a few feet away from her. He waves her off, and she sighs.

“He’s a climber, huh?” Emma has moved back to her, smiling with barely veiled fondness at Henry.

“He used to climb everything when he was younger,” Regina says. “When he was four, he climbed my apple tree, fell, broke his wrist. He was in hospital for a week.”

“Sounds scary.”

“Terrifying.” Even that’s an understatement—Regina remembers the crying; the whitewash of colour which all blurred into one terrified streaks as the ambulance came and took him away; the long, sleepless nights curled up in a cot next to his resting, morphine-filled body, watching him heal all too slowly—“I tried to get him to stop climbing things after that. He didn’t listen, and when I tried to push—well. It didn’t work.”

Emma had been watching her with that same constant, soft expression as she’d spoke—which is probably _why_ Regina had spoke, why she’d let all that out—and she moves closer now, squeezes Regina’s arm just above the elbow before putting two fingers in her mouth and whistling a shrill blast.

“Miss Swan!”

“Chill, Regina, at least I’ve gotten his attention,” Emma says, then turns to Henry. “Hey, kid, come down here, your mom wants to talk to you.”

Henry leaps down— _leaps,_ which causes Regina’s stomach to flip over in brief apprehension—but once again, his balance is exemplary as he lands on two feet. “Yeah?”

She straightens his scarf and beanie, both of which had fallen askew. “Be careful up there, Henry. You don't want to hurt yourself on your first trip.”

His face brightens immediately. “So there'll be more?”

Regina winces internally; she hadn't _meant_ to be railroaded so easily, but her son is as sharp as ever, and the way both him _and_ Emma are looking at her with such obvious hope on their face makes her defences—well, not crumble, but at least lower for now.

“We'll see, honey. Now, do you want to look around some more? _Without_ climbing,” she adds. Henry nods eagerly, and they head further into the cave. It's a good decision; the passages open up into broad, cavernous spaces of multiple levels, and the structures become even more complex, lit from below from some unseen, soft-blue light source, and Regina is entranced.

She all but spins herself into dizziness taking it all in, the brilliant yet subtle colours, the sparkling crystal growths and delicate shapes spiralling up and around them, like something taken straight out of a dream, out of a secret bedtime story

“Woah, hey,” Emma suddenly cuts in, grabbing her by the arm. Regina blinks, and looks down to see that her feet are mere inches from a sheer twenty-foot drop onto the lower level and the sharp-looking icicles awaiting below. “Wouldn't want you to hurt yourself after that little piece you said to Henry.”

“Of course not,” Regina says, taking a hasty step back and collecting herself. “Thank you.”

“Any time. I still owe you, after all—you know, for saving my life. Twice.”

Regina frowns a little. “You could have come back sooner, if you were still so worried about that.”

“I told you, I was just off by a bit—” Emma begins, but Regina glares at her and she clamps her mouth shut again for a few seconds, flushing slightly. “Okay. I—I didn't mean for it to be a _month_ , but I did want to, you know. Give you guys some time.”

“Time for what, Emma?”

“For you guys to think things through further, figure out whether you wanted me around at all?” Emma laughs thinly, mirthlessly. “You know, talk things through.”

“Henry and I barely talk at _all_ ,” Regina reminds her testily. “You knew this.”

Emma looks down at her feet, kicks out at a small pile of ice crystals which had built up nearby. “I know. I—I _am_ sorry about that, it's just that—I'm not good at holding onto people, you know? I mean, look at me,” Emma says, stretching out her arms, opening herself up. “I'm a Time Lady who basically went rogue. I don't exactly have allies to bail me out if we get in danger, and we'll probably be in danger all the time. I mean, that’s why I gave you the gun.”

“I noticed, thanks. You're not exactly trying to convince me that we should stick around here,” Regina points out.

“No, I'm being honest. I don't want to see you guys get hurt,” Emma says softly, looking back up at her.

“You barely know us.”

“I know enough. You helped me when you didn't need to, first in your backyard, then coming back for me on New Prospect.”

“Hardly out of the ordinary,” Regina says with a sniff, looking away from the gentleness of Emma's gaze. “Any good person would do the same.”

“Yeah, and there are less of those around than you might think,” Emma says. When Regina remains silent, her brow creases. “You don't think you're one of them?”

“Ask my son. He seems to have lots of opinions on the matter." Regina sighs. "Shall we move on?”

Emma looks at her for a few more seconds, then nods. “Sure.”

 

* * *

 

The ice cave continues on for seemingly hundreds of yards, deep into the mountain, smaller, seemingly unexplored caves and passageways branching off to the side. The ice structures are no less beautiful—if anything, down here they’re even more pristine and striking—but they also get much more densely packed together, the path through becoming narrower and narrower, the number of levels becoming greater and greater with more precarious drops between each. At some points their path is completely blocked by thin ice gates, and Emma gives Regina a pocket lighter—though _pocket_ refers only to size, not power—so they can literally melt their way through.

Regina is starting to wonder if they should head back, although to herself she’s admittedly loath to do so and leave this ice paradise. However, when they reach a forbidding-looking abyss with only a narrow ice bridge across, Regina feels that’s as good a sign as any that their trip is at an end.

“Mom, come _on,_ ” Henry whines. “There’s so much on the other side!”

Which is true, there _is_ quite a lot on the other side—in particular, a huge, thirty-foot-high arc made of deep blue translucent ice, perfectly sculpted and proportioned. In fact, the structures on the other side are markedly more regular and organised than the ones they’d been stepping around for the last half hour, which makes Regina suspect that some of these structures are not entirely natural.

Still, the bridge can’t be more than a foot thick. “Henry...”

“ _Please?_ ”

Regina sighs. “Fine. I'll go.”

At that, Henry looks a little more hesitant. "Mom, I don't need—"

"It's okay, sweetheart. I’ll cross, and if it’s safe I’ll call you over

Emma starts, briefly holds Regina back. “Maybe I should go. I’m the one with the regenerations—”

Regina gives her a narrow-eyed glare, and she quiets immediately. “You’re our ticket home, Miss Swan,” Regina says testily. “I’ll go.”

And she does, taking careful step after careful step. At first she pays close attention to where she’s walking, but it does look a _very_ long way down and she snaps her gaze back upright—why did she even volunteer for this in the first place? Had she forgotten just how much she despises heights down to the very core of her being?

The ice seems to be holding steady, though, as she crosses the narrowest point of the bridge—until it isn’t.

The first sign of trouble is a little crackling underneath her left heel. It’s enough to stop her dead in her tracks, and she’s about to open her mouth to warn Henry that no, this bridge is _not_ safe after all—too late, though, as the block ice she’s standing off snaps clean off at either end and she falls into the chasm.

“Regina!”

“ _Mom!”_

She doesn’t scream, mainly because her chest has suddenly seized up in terror at the idea that she’s falling, _falling_ _,_ most likely to the death in some pitch-black abyss on a far-off-world—but she hits the bottom just a few seconds’ in.

“Ah!” The ground is relatively soft and rubbery—and perfectly black, which explains why it had looked so deep—but that fall had been no small matter even if it hadn’t really been enough to seriously endanger her life, and her right ankle is already feeling the effects. “Emma? Henry?”

“Mom!” She looks up and sees Henry peering with a china-white face over the edge about thirty feet above. “Are you okay?”

“I’m here, Henry,” she calls out as strongly as possible, then breathes in deeply. Her ankle really, _really_ hurts, and so does the rest of her body, really. But she's alive. “I don’t think that bridge is safe, though.”

Emma’s face joins him. “Regina, are you alright?” she asks, sounding openly panicked. “Can you climb back up?”

“Does it _look_ like I can climb back up?” she snaps, then hisses. Her ankle still kills, but it’s starting to feel a little numb—as are her fingers and toes, to be honest. “Can you get a ladder and climb down? And bring gasoline or wood.”

Emma frowns at her. “Why would you need that?”

Despite herself, Regina rolls her eyes, rests her head on the edge of the chasm in unconcealed annoyance. “So I can start a fire, idiot. I have no wish to die of hypothermia down here.”

Emma’s eyes widen in brief outrage and she looks like she’s about to complain—but she remembers herself just in time and nods. “Al—alright. Ten minutes, okay?”

With that, she leaves, and there’s silence for a moment. Regina takes deep breaths despite the frigid air, trying to ignore the pain in her ankle. To be honest, it’s not even that bad any more, as it doesn’t feel broken and the numbing effect of the cold is dulling most of the sharpness. Her lit torch has at least fallen next to her and is still aflame, so she holds it close, lets it warm her and light her surroundings.

“Mom, are you still there?” Henry’s voice is plaintive, weak, and he sounds like—well, like himself again. A little boy scared for his mother.

“Still here, sweetheart.” She looks around to see if there are any interesting sights on this level, so she can distract him by describing them for him. Unfortunately, her surroundings are almost entirely black, made of that same soft, rubbery material that she’d landed on—save for a softly blinking red square right down the end, about thirty yards away. “There’s something here, I think.”

It works, because curiosity displaces some of the fear in his voice. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” She bites her lip, thinking her options through for a moment—then pushes herself up using the wall for support, gritting her teeth against the sparkles of complaint which light up in her injured ankle. It’s definitely not broken, though, and she at least can stand with the wall for support. “I’m going to have a look.”

She slowly makes her way to the red light, bracing against the wall with support and wincing with every step. It takes her about five minutes and no end of gritted teeth, but she makes it and sees that the red square is actually a flat light illuminated from within, pulsating on and off. She can’t help it—like a moth drawn to a flame, she reaches up and brushes two fingers across it surfaces.

It immediately turns a vibrant gold and lets out a low klaxon-like noise.

“Mom? What was that?”

“Nothing, Henry,” she says, but her eyes are bulging in alarm. They do even more so when the wall—the _wall_ starts moves, the ground shuddering. Regina loses her balance on her one good foot, falling to all fours, as the wall slides downwards in a cloud of mechanical steam, before vanishing with a deep thud.

“Um… mom?” Henry’s voice is small and very, very surprised. “What is _that?_ ”

Regina looks up.

Standing in the space revealed by the removed wall at the end of the small canyon is a figure. A very, very tall figure, probably just over seven feet. It looks humanoid, with two legs and two arms, but the proportions are all wrong: the head is too big, the legs too long, the torso too thick. Or maybe that could be the layers and layers of heavy, silver-patterned armour the creature is wearing, together with the helmet covering half of a decidedly reptilian green-scaled face. Regina isn’t looking at any of that, though.

Her eyes are too busy staring at the very long, very sharp sword in the creature’s hand. And then they’re too busy looking at the creature’s eyes, which blink open to reveal blood-red eyes.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the creature turns its head to look down at Regina on the floor in front of it, and it raises its sword.

Regina screams.

“ _Emma!”_


	6. Chapter 6

For a moment, the scene is frozen in time.

Regina is prone on the ground on all fours, looking up at the enormous, ice-armour-clad reptilian figure towering over her with its sword raised, ready to strike a surely fatal blow as Regina screams out Emma’s name—and then Henry screams back.

“ _Mom!_ ”

The creature pauses, holds its sword steady and slowly turns its head upwards. It hesitates as if taken aback by Henry’s presence above, distracted from the injured Regina below, and in that moment Regina takes her chance.

She’s used guns before, of course, growing up on Mother’s farm. So even though the small pistol she’d demanded from Emma is obviously from a time and place that is not her own, the principle is the same, so in a single motion she pulls it from her hip and pulls the trigger.

An enormous gonging noise reverberates around the space, deafening Regina for a few seconds. She blinks, mildly disoriented, and looks at her gun in disbelief. Whatever she had been expecting, _that_ had not been on the list—at a bare minimum, she’d expected something _physical_ to come out the end. Instead, she seems to have been given some sort of glorified megaphone in a gun-shape.

The noise, though, seems to catch the creature off-guard, and it staggers backwards. Not knowing what else to do, Regina fires again, and there’s another deafening boom that echoes around the cavern. The creature groans, a rasping, rippling noise like a lion trapped in a cage against its will, stumbling from left to right. A crack appears in its armour, snaking left-to-right, and Regina fires one more time.

The armour around its body shatters, revealing a thick torso covered in the same green scales as what she can see of its face, and the creature topples with a crash, the sword falling uselessly from its hand.

Regina blinks, and gives one more glance at her gun, albeit with less suspicion this time. Perhaps this thing isn’t so useless after all. She pulls herself to her feet, keeping the gun carefully trained on the unmoving body of the creature, and for a moment, there’s peace.

“Mom?” Henry asks above her, his voice still small and nervous. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, sweetheart,” she reassures. “Miss Swan’s toys aren’t as useless as they seem, apparently.”

“Yeah, um,” Henry says, glancing over his shoulder, “whatever that thing is, it broke, like, half the stuff up here.”

Regina sighs, looks up at him. She doesn’t know whether he had meant to sound accusing, but it’d had more than a note of it. “I did what I had to, Henry. Now once Miss Swan gets back, we can lower the ladder and then leave—”

“No.”

Regina stops, looks down.

“No,” the creature growls, its baleful, blood-red eyes having opened again. “No one leaves.”

At that moment, Regina notices an object in the creature’s hand, spherical and dark-green in colour—and, next to it, a small metal pin.

_A grenade._

It detonates with a flash and an eardrum-perforating boom. She all but bounces off the far wall and falls to the ground, head spinning and ears ringing, her gun knocked far away and her torch falling at her feet. Her vision is blurred and swimming, but she can see the creature retrieving its sword and getting to its feet, bearing down on her with an ominous, spin-tingling wheezing noise with every step.

“My name is Gamlin, Supreme Marshal of the Ice Warriors and overlord of this world,” the creature growls, raising its sword again above its head. “And no creature shall trespass upon our domain and live.”

Regina’s entire body aches, her mind has been wiped blank, and she can’t do anything but stare and watch as the sword comes down, slicing fatally through her body—or not.

Or not, because a block of ice, two feet thick, falls from above and crashes right onto the Ice Warrior’s head.

It drops the sword in surprise and stumbles back, staring up in fury at the perpetrators: Henry, holding another block of ice— _and Emma_.

“Hey ice-dude,” Emma calls down, and Regina stares up at her in astonishment even as Henry giggles. _Ice dude?_ “How about you pick on someone your own size?” With that, she and Henry throw down another chunk of ice, which bounces off the Ice Warrior’s helmet.

Enraged, it roars and raises its arm to fire a bolt of some unknown energy up at them, but Emma and Henry have more than enough time to dodge and the projectile hits the ceiling, shattering a few icicles and showering Regina with ice crystals.

“Emma!” Regina yells in irritation, shielding her head with her arms as she gets to her feet again, the disorientation having now sufficiently cleared up. “I’d really prefer if you _didn’t_ antagonise this thing while my son is nearby, thank you very much.”

“Shut up, Mills, I’m trying to save your life,” Emma fires back, and she and Henry roll another, much larger cylindrical block of ice onto the Ice Warrior’s head. It shatters, little pieces bouncing off the peak of its helmet as if in a cartoon, and it howls its fury.

“Time Lords,” it roars, firing yet more ill-directed bolts of energy up at them and missing completely and giving Regina yet _another_ unwanted ice shower. “You will never keep our people down again!”

“Time _Lady_ ,” Emma objects, and Regina covers her face with her hands. “And no one’s taking anything from you, so long as you let us go.”

“Or what?”

“Not telling,” Emma says, almost sing-song, and Regina wonders which of the two of them up there is the actual child. “It’ll be a surprise. Just let Regina go and we’ll be on our way.”

The Ice Warrior blinks, lowers its arm. “Regina?” It turns its head to look at Regina, studying her with newly curious eyes—which, on balance, is even more frightening than before. “Regina Mills? Oh, this is interesting.”

There’s a dead silence for a few seconds, then—“How do you know my mom?” Henry asks in a low, quiet voice.

“I know of her family and I know of the prophecy which foretells your future. And _yours_ , Emma Swan.” It raises its arm again, aims straight at Regina’s face. “And I'm ready to play my part in that future—which will now be very brief. Goodbye, Time Lords.”

Regina swallows, mouth dry, mind blank as she stares down the hollow barrel of the wrist-mounted gun—but Emma, above, is still active.

“Surprise, asshole,” Emma snarls, and together with Henry, throws down one more cube of ice onto the Ice Warrior’s head— _no_ , not ice.

A glass canister, full of liquid, which shatters and dumps its contents all over him.

He yells in surprise—but laughs as the liquid drips from him. “Is that your idea of a surprise, Time Lady? It will take far more than a shower to stop me,” he boasts, but at that moment the scent of the liquid hits Regina’s nose, sharp, stinging and pungent.

_Gasoline._

She doesn’t hesitate, and the Ice Warrior is too distracted to react in time. All it can do is stare at Regina in shock as the still-burning torch is shoved at its chest, a moment of pure clarity between the two of them—before the gasoline ignites.

Regina leaps backwards, falling over on her injured ankle and twisting it yet further, but she doesn’t even think about that. She just stares in fascination as the Ice Warrior burns, falling slowly onto its knees and then onto its face, the flames spreading and consuming it whole. Within seconds, it’s nothing but a smouldering pile of ash.

Regina sighs, and rests her head back on the wall of the chasm as peace falls at last. She can hear her heart beating at a million beats a minute, and she feels—

Well, she feels alive. Blissfully, thrillingly alive.

“Regina?” Emma calls down at last, her voice having lots its hardened edge. “You okay?”

“I’m okay, Emma,” she replies, feeling her adrenaline levels starting to lower at last—and, despite herself, she lets out a high, relieved laugh. “That—that was quite something.”

Emma laughs back, and Regina can hear a smacking noise of skin against skin above—high fives between the Time Lady and Regina’s son. “Yeah.”

“Next time, _warn_ me before you give me an overpowered foghorn instead of a gun.”

“It’s a sonic blaster!” Emma protests. “It’s really useful technology, and I can show you all sorts of cool tricks and—and you’re winding me up, aren’t you?”

Regina can hear Henry giggling above, and Emma lets out a loud, annoyed sigh.

“Asshole. Hang on, I’ll get you the ladder and then we can get—”

Regina doesn’t find out _what_ they can get, though, as Emma abruptly stops talking. With reason, as that low klaxon sounds out again—and again, and again, and row after row of blinking red squares lights up all around them.

“Regina?” Emma asks cautiously, “What’s going on?”

Yet more hidden doors slide away to reveal yet more Ice Warriors, and Regina swallows and stands, picking up the sonic pistol from where it had fallen—but immediately, she notices these are different. These Ice Warriors are smaller, their armour less thick and ornately decorated, and none of them are armed. In fact, they don’t look like Warriors at all.

“Mom,” Henry calls out, obviously alarmed, “I don’t think we should—”

“Quiet, Henry,” Regina says, as the closest and most lavishly decorated Ice Warrior is fully revealed. Its eyes blink open, but these are a glimmering, dark black, rather than the lethal, angry red of Gamlin. It looks down at the pile of ash in front of it—then, to Regina’s eternal surprise, it falls to its knees.

“Regina Mills,” it says in a gravelly yet respectful, almost worshipful tone of voice, bowing its head. “We are forever in your debt.”

 

* * *

 

Saurians, they’re called.

That’s the first thing they find out from the _actual_ Ice Warrior— _Saurian_ king, a kindly, dignified old reptile named Johan. Both Regina and Emma treat him and the rest of his reanimated people with wariness at first, not least because even the ceremonial armour looks kind of intimidating. But apparently it’s actually their way of surviving in the extreme cold climates they call home; additionally, Henry takes to him and Regina warms, both literally and figuratively, when he and several of his people help her out of the chasm, immediately tending to her injured ankle.

“My people are not originally from this planet,” Johan says as he encases Regina’s ankle in some sort of alien healing gel. She'd been intensely sceptical of the stuff, but Emma had been absolutely certain that it wouldn't just remove the pain, it would completely heal her injuries within the hour. So far, it's living up to the first half of the advertised potential at least. “We know nothing of our old home, however. Everything else has been lost in the blizzards of time. Some believe the planet, named Mars by some, was never even real.”

Regina and Emma share a glance. “Oh, it’s real, alright,” Emma says, watching over them. All around, Saurians are going to and fro slicing, ferrying and placing pieces of ice, the first signs of rebuilding a long-dormant society.

Johan’s eyes light up in surprise. “Really? That is good to know. In any case, the stories tell that as our world turned cold, our people became obsessed with violence and carnage, which is why some still know us by the name _Ice Warriors,_ ” he says, and even through alien lips Regina can hear the disdain. “It tore us apart, distracting us as our world slowly became inhospitable.”

“So some of you left,” Regina surmises.

“Some of us, yes. We wished to build a new world, without the old castes, free of infighting and needless conflict, and so we built a ship and fled to this world. Not ideal, but by then we had become accustomed to the cold, and the terrain made us hard to find.”

“Until the humans came,” Emma says, her expression having softened at last.

“Many were terrified of them,” Johan says, bowing his head. “And I understand their fear—the great ships in the sky, blocking the sun, reminding us from the dark stories of the past. But I believed— _believe_ that we could coexist. Some did not.”

“Gamlin,” Regina guesses.

“He was a hero once,” Johan says, his voice tinged with old sadness. “A genuinely honourable warrior and a friend. But he suddenly became convinced that the humans were a threat that could only be met through force, and that it was a choice between our survival and theirs. And the battle he imagined slowly consumed him and drove him mad.”

“What, you mean he just… changed?” Emma asks sceptically.

“On his own? I think not. I believe that some malevolent force influenced him, captured his ear.” A long, tired sigh. It’s an odd, rasping sort of noise. “But now we’ll never know.”

“So you just gave up on him and you hid?” Emma asks, still frowning. “You decided not to deal with him, and just locked yourself up in the ice?”

“You saw him. He became obsessed with domination at the end, convinced that a return to the dark old ways was the only possible path. Too many agreed with him, and conflict was inevitable.” He shakes his helmeted head. “We had no choice, or he would have corrupted us and destroyed the humans who live on this world in peace.”

“You could have fought for what you believed in,” Emma says, her eyes hardening with sudden steel. “You should have stood your ground, instead of putting your whole society on ice to stop one guy.”

Johan looks up at Emma, studies her with twinkling eyes. “You are wiser than you look, young Time Lady. I can see why you are featured in so many of the old stories, both of you.”

“ _What_ old stories?” Regina demands. “How on earth do you people know about us?”

Johan turns his eyes back to her, appraises her for a long, long moment. "There is a prophecy. About a very old war between Gallifrey and its Queen."

"Gallifrey doesn't have a  _Queen,_ " Emma points out, her arms folded across her chest.

"This person begged to differ. This prophecy speaks of the Queen's return from her exile."

Regina swallows, hears her heart hammering in her ears. "And... how exactly does this involve Emma and I?"

He shakes his head. “I cannot say more. You are too young, and only the Time Lords know the full prophecy.”

Which is _infuriating—_ “If you think I’m going to sit here and accept—”

“He’s talking about our own future, Regina,” Emma says in a tightly controlled voice, “which we aren’t allowed to know about. Time Lord rules.”

Johan shakes his head. “All I can say is this: across all of time and space, there has been a very old, very destructive war between light and dark. A war which you will end, for good or for ill.”

The hairs on Regina’s neck stand up on end. “And do you know _which?_ ”

“No,” Johan says. “That part is up to you.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a few more hours until they leave the ice cave for good. Johan decides to throw them a celebratory-slash-thank-you feast once Regina's ankle is healed, and he is absolutely insistent on his honour as a Saurian-slash-Ice-Warrior that they _must_ attend. Regina by then is more than a little exhausted; it’s been a long, _long_ day, and it seems like forever ago that Henry had been tearfully calling her _evil_ in her own house—

But that’s part of the reason she agrees to stick around, because Henry’s eyes are gleaming and excited as he watches with wonder as the Saurians transform the ice sculptures into something even more beautiful, even more captivating than before. Regina is entranced too as they shape great halls and rooms from the crystalline blue-white and bring great tables laden with food sourced from goodness-knows-where.

“To peace,” Johan declares at the head of the table, Regina, Emma and Henry sitting beside him, and Regina can drink to that.

Anyway. After that they really _do_ go, and even Henry is all but dead on his feet well before they get back to the Bug, Regina carrying him inside.

“Kid looks tired,” Emma says fondly, shucking off her jacket and covering the now-sleeping Henry as they lay him gently on one of the couches in the console room. Regina kisses his brow and he murmurs something in his rest, a slight, unconscious smile rising on his face. “It’s been a long day.”

“It has,” Regina agrees, suppressing a yawn of her own. “I assume you have two bedrooms somewhere in this maze of yours?”

Emma rolls her eyes, starts toying with the buttons on the console. “ _Yes_ , Regina. I kind of live in this thing, you know. Now just give me a minute, I have to bring up the Bug’s temporal history to work out exactly when we left—”

“Emma,” Regina interjects, keeping her voice admirably level given how tired she is. It’s not Emma’s fault she’s thicker than two planks stuck together—although actually now that she thinks about it, it sort of is, but Regina is feeling charitable for some reason. Perhaps it’s the food. “I’m asking if you have rooms for us.”

Emma stops, turns around. Her eyebrows are raised and her widened eyes are brightened with surprise and youthful hope, and Regina almost feels herself smiling at the expression. “You mean… yeah?”

Regina swallows. She’s spent most of the last hour thinking about this, about whether she really should change her mind and dive in head-first into _this_ , this _life_ that Emma is offering her that she’d so flatly rejected just a month ago. But Henry hadn’t been with her then, and it had only taken one look at his still-lingering delight, his excitable chatter, one recollection of the way he’d yelled out _mom_ as she’d fallen from the bridge, and—and she can’t take that from him.

She just _can’t_.

“Yes, Emma. If that’s okay with you, of course,” she adds quickly—this is technically Emma’s home, after all, and it wouldn’t do to be impolite.

Emma’s mouth quivers, like she’s fighting the broad grin obviously threatening to break out all over her face. “Yeah—I mean, you have to be sure, though. You know that I’m not kidding when I say this is dangerous, even if I'm not working right now.”

Regina hesitates, pauses. As thrilling, as heart-pumping, as unforgettable as the evening had been, Regina can’t forget that she’d come within moments—seconds, really—of dying far, far away from home. But at least it had been _her_ who had been in danger, and not her son—and she would gladly trade a little edge in her life for the chance to see him smiling at her again. So long as both she and Emma are around to protect him, he should— _should_ —be okay. It’s not as if Storybrooke is all that safe right now either, she remembers with an unpleasant kick in her stomach.

“Well,” she says slowly, “give me a proper gun next time, and that won’t be a problem.”

Emma just laughs and laughs.

 

* * *

 

Henry's room is upstairs and about fifty yards down the long corridor. She lays him gently down on the four-poster bed, and he shifts a little, murmurs unintelligibly and twitches his hand, but he doesn't wake and soon his breathing evens to a gentle snore.

For a moment, she contemplates waking him up and telling him the good news—but she quickly dismisses the thought. There'll be plenty of time for that in the morning, and—as she realises suddenly, accompanied by a joyful lightness rising within her like a hot air balloon that forces her to suppress a laugh—she's in a _time machine_ , she can take all the time in the world, safe in the knowledge that her entire  _life_ and all its twists and hassles and stresses can be put on hold more or less indefinitely. They'll be there when she return; they're just waiting for Emma to bring them back to five minutes or so after they'd originally left.

Even _more_ tempting is the urge to pull up a chair or a mattress up to the side of the bed and watch him sleep, maybe fall asleep herself to the sound of his soft snoring—she is  _very_ tired too—but she remembers, she has a few questions she wants to ask Emma, who's she's sure is still awake. So instead, she kisses Henry gently on the forehead, pulls up the blanket so it's a little more snug around his body, and heads back to the console room.

There, she finds that Emma is indeed awake and sitting in the car doorway—which is now a normal doorway, and perfectly rectangular.

"What on earth—?"

Emma turns around, looks up at her. "Oh. Hi. The door—um, sometimes the Bug just kind of knows how I'm feeling and makes the door a bit wider so I can sit down. It still looks like a car on the outside, I think."

Regina walks down the stairs and over to the doorway, looking out beyond. They're in deep space, obviously, surrounded by the deepest black Regina has ever seen, interrupted only by vague dots of light from distant galaxies far, far away.

"I wasn't aware that the Bug could change its disguise."

"It can, though I haven't worked out how to control it myself," Emma says with a shrug, and Regina isn't surprised one bit. "It has a cloaking device too, which has saved my ass a few times."

"Useful to know." She bites her lip a little—then sits down next to Emma in the doorway, nudging her over to give herself enough room to swing her legs out into space. "This is nice."

"Yeah. I do this a lot, as you've probably guessed."

"And it doesn't get... lonely at all?" Regina asks, glancing curiously at her blonde-haired companion— _friend_ _?_ Could that even work after just three meetings? She shakes her head loose of the question, focuses on the one she'd actually asked instead. "I can't imagine there's another living organism anywhere near us."

"Not unless you count the self-replicating plasma clouds, and I don't," Emma says with a wry smile, before her expression becomes a little more serious. She ducks her head behind her hair, and Regina is filled with this strange, strange urge to brush it away, tuck it behind her ear. In her defence, she's sure that Emma's hair would look far better if Regina could spend ten minutes with it, which of course she never will. "I dunno. It is and it isn't—at least out here you know you're meant to be alone, you know? Instead of, like, feeling that way in a crowd."

"I can see that." She looks out at the stars again. "It's very pretty."

"It is, isn't it? Not as nice as the system New Prospect is in, I guess, but still nice."

"And no mining platforms with hidden portals to feelings-eating monsters in sight," Regina quips, and Emma laughs, throwing her head back a little so Regina can get a good look at her face. The light isn't bright—the room lighting has been dimmed to a soft glow—but it still seems to shine when reflected off Emma's eyes, the rosy complexion of her cheeks. She looks away—and remembers why she'd come down here in the first place. "Emma, about this evening."

"What about it?" Emma asks, and her voice is suddenly a little thinner, a little higher in pitch, and her eyes are wide as if she's— _scared?_ "If you guys are having second thoughts, then that's fine—"

"No, no, of course not," Regina says quickly, and is immediately rewarded by Emma relaxing visibly. "I enjoyed it— _Henry_ enjoyed it, which is more important. But after we defeated Gamlin, Johan mentioned..."

"Oh. Yeah." Emma shrugs again, an oddly casual gesture for the situation but one that Regina is starting to associate with her. "I looked it up. The Queen he mentioned definitely exists—or existed, the records aren't clear on that. She's called the Black Queen and she was apparently a really nasty piece of work. Rose up from one of the slums on Gallifrey, tried to take over the planet, started a massive war. Eventually she was defeated, then had her regeneration stripped, then got exiled, then just disappeared."

"Disappeared?" Regina feels a deep, heavy sense of foreboding settling in her chest, one she can't quite justify from Emma's words alone. "You mean... she's biding her time, waiting to come back?"

"No one knows, apparently. The Time Lords can't find any trace of her, and I can tell you from experience that that's seriously hard to pull off." She starts playing with the ends of her own hair, and Regina is oddly transfixed. "I dunno. I don't think it's worth worrying about, really."

"Johan mentioned a prophecy, though. Involving us."

"I know. I looked that up too."

Regina swallows, the foreboding intensifies... "And you found...?"

"Zip. Nothing. Bug wouldn't let me see anything."

Regina stares. "What?"

"I told you, Regina, it's a really, really bad idea to start trying to find out your own future before it happens. Time machines will do basically anything to stop you if you try."

"I wasn't aware that a car that's bigger on the inside is actually alive too."

"Oh, it's alive—more alive than you and me, in a way. It has good reasons, to be fair—you're risking a really horrible paradox if you find out your own future, don't like it and try to change it. Or maybe you  _do_ like it, and you do something different to make sure it happens and screw everything up," Emma explains. "Time is complicated, I guess."

"What's the worst that could happen?" Regina asks, frowning.

"Oh, you know—you and I could be erased from history, or a galaxy could blow up, or we could accidentally rip a hole in the universe. And you've seen why that's a bad thing."

 _Feelings-eating monsters_ , Regina remembers. "I see. But—Emma, if frozen Ice Warriors and even Gamlin knew about this prophecy, then—"

"Probably lots of people do, and it explains why so many people are after me and some are trying to kill me?" A bitter, resigned laugh. "Makes me want to find out about it even less, to be honest."

Which is reasonable, but—"Doesn't it get frustrating, though, knowing you have a future written down somewhere out there and not being able to see it?" Regina has so many questions she wants to ask of history—especially about her future with her son. If she even has one, long term. But Emma just makes a face and shrugs.

"Not really, when you put it like that. I don't think about that stuff, you know? I don't like thinking about the past and I never thought I'd have much of a future, so it makes sense to live completely in the now and just... go around finding people. Before I met you guys, anyway."

"Why do you even  _have_ that job?" Regina asks curiously. "You don't exactly need to work for a living as far as I can tell."

"I don't, but it's something I'm good at and—it lets me help people, I guess?" Emma looks straight at Regina, holds her gaze, and her eyes are soft and clear. "It makes me feel like my life has some sort of meaning, like I'm doing something useful with it. Everyone needs that, you know?"

Regina thinks of her son, of the tiny little bundle of love she'd dedicated her life to raising, to guiding through his first steps, his first words, his first cough, his first day at school. She thinks about the path she'd embarked upon a decade before, wonders about how it had taken her to this spot, here, sitting next to a blonde-haired alien with stars in her eyes and her feet swinging back and forth into space—and she decides to just accept it anyway.

"Yes," she murmurs, looks back out at the unblinking grains of light radiating from thousands of light years away. She settles back, lets her silk-covered shoulder brush against the rough leather covering Emma's. "Everyone needs that."

 


	7. Chapter 7

She sleeps fitfully that night in her bedroom aboard the Bug, her dreams disturbed by fragments of colour, visions of mountains towering impossibly high and dark valleys deep below, images of starships and galaxies and solar systems that she would never have even imagined had she not seen them with her own two eyes; and a brilliant, incandescent blue, a dazzling light blooming into a spherical gateway into a whole new universe as a voice reminds Regina that _I am your_ _mother, Regina, and I know what’s best for you—_

She jerks awake with a gasp, startled upright in her bed and her hand on her chest. She takes a few seconds to let her breathing even out and her head to stop spinning, feeling the too-fast _thump-thump, thump-thump_ rhythm of her heart under her palm. It’s strangely reassuring having that feedback—with the emphasis on _strange_ , because it’s not as if her heart has ever beat any _differently_. She doesn’t need to check to know that she’s still human, as opposed to having twin hearts like Emma.

_Emma._

Memory trickles back into her head, and she remembers the decision she’d made last night, choosing to let the Time Lady show her and her son the whole universe, make him _happy_.

 _Well._ In theory that decision isn’t final, and she could march into the console room—where she somehow _knows_ that Emma isn’t sleeping—and demand that they be returned home, and Emma would. Emma _would_ , and she’d watch as the light dims in Emma’s eyes and Henry’s eyes too, and she’d return to the endless grind of Mayoral life with a son who refuses to speak to her half the time—

She shakes her head and stands up, and before she knows it she’s heading for the room on the opposite side of the corridor.

Henry’s room is brighter than hers, the walls painted all cool blues and light greens and healthily illuminated from below, and his four-poster bed is even more comfortable than the one back home—which is a feat—but Henry isn’t aware of any of this, as he hadn’t woken up the previous night when both Regina and Emma had carried him to bed. Regina pulls up a chair up to the side of his bed and sits down, fully intending to watch him sleep for a few hours as she’d done when he was three, four, five years old, but as she’d stopped doing once getting her current job—but within seconds, he stirs awake with a soft sigh.

“Mom?” he says sleepily, opening heavily lidded eyes. “This isn’t my room.”

“Not quite, no,” Regina says softly, smoothing messy hair away from his eyes. He closes his eyes again, doesn’t— _doesn’t_ —flinch. “But you’ll be staying here for the next while.”

“Where are we?”

“On Emma’s Bug—her time machine,” Regina adds for clarification. “She’s agreed to let us stay for a while.”

He opens his eyes again, and they’re bright, _bright._ “Really?”

“Really.” She can’t help herself—she pushes her chin up with her hand and smiles down at him, her heart overflowing as she looks down on her beautiful boy. “You’re going to see the universe, sweetheart.”

He reaches up, tentatively takes hold of her hand, squeezes softly. “Thanks, mom.”

Regina smiles and smiles, and is perfectly content to just sit here _forever_ like this, with her son—but, of course, the moment is broken by the sound of careless stomping outside the room and a bewilderingly cheery Emma sticking her head in the door, given the time their body clocks must be showing.

“Oh cool, you guys are up already. Come downstairs, I think I know where we should go next.”

Regina rolls her eyes and stands as Emma skips away and back down to the console room. “Go take a shower, Henry. I’ll make breakfast and see you downstairs.”

“Okay, mom.”

 

* * *

 

It's the start of a whirlwind for the three of them. Regina is vaguely aware that they spend months on Emma's Bug, purely counting by the number of times she needs to sleep, but she loses track after a while.

It's hard to tell on a time machine, after all, bouncing around from planet to planet, from millennium to millennium. The three of them see futuristic skylines dominated by gleaming, mile-high skyscrapers far removed from the steel-concrete edifices Regina is more familiar with, surrounded by lane upon lane of vehicles hovering silently through the air; breathtaking artificial worlds whose skies are streaked with vivid, brilliant reds and oranges and purples; more deep caverns lined by towers of green-blue crystal twisting and rising into intricate, organic shapes.

She sees the future in which the Earth dies and is reborn, its inhabitants flung out to a hundred thousand different corners of the universe. She sees the past that Henry's textbooks talk in such stupefying terms come alive in the flesh, she watches history that she'd read about in stories and books and films playing out _for real_  before her and her son's eyes—she has to work hard and enlist Emma's help in stopping a starstruck Henry from going straight up to Alexander Hamilton and shaking his hand.

He manages to do so later, mind, not least because Regina is a little starstruck herself.

In all honesty, it's hard for her to pick favourite moments, mostly because there's no shortage of them. Every day sees something new, sometimes multiple things new, and their life becomes a ceaseless string of moments and moments which Regina just wants to freeze in time and capture _forever_ , whether it be seeing some extraordinary sights or running hand-in-hand, adrenaline pumping through her veins as they flee down narrow corridors from some thirteen-eyed monster or the like.

But really, it's the quiet moments she savours. The ones where it's just Emma, Regina and her son, for example, learning to fly kites.

On horseback.

“Is this _really_ safe, Miss Swan?” she calls out to Emma on her white stallion a few metres away. Regina is good on a horse—excellent, in fact, having only lost a shade of her touch since her days on the farm—but the ground here is rocky and uneven, and her attention is divided between riding and watching over Henry, who is not so experienced on a horse.

More to the point, she's used to riding with _two_ hands for _two_ reins, not one hand holding both and the other dragging an enormous and whistling box kite through the air behind her, constantly tugging on her arm.

Still, Henry seems to have natural skill on horseback, and his brown colt trots along calmly beside Regina's mare, his blue-and-green box kite dancing in the breeze above. Emma, meanwhile, is cantering at ridiculously unsafe speeds in wide circles around them, waving her own rainbow-coloured delta kite madly about without a care in the world for how it surely must be unbalancing her in the saddle.

“Come on, Regina, it's fun,” Emma half-shouts back, whooping as her kite does a small loop-the-loop. Regina rolls her eyes and sides, but she allows herself an undeniably fond smile as she watches Emma cavorting about on her stallion, sharing jokes with Henry and laughing as she goes. If she's being honest with herself, it _is_ sort of enjoyable doing this, spending the afternoon teaching her son to ride as she'd always vaguely wanted to do over vast, rolling moors, even if it also involves extra hazards, as she's now realised will be the norm for _anything_ involving Emma.

“It looks _suicidal_ ,” Regina comments, despite her smile.

“ _Mom_ , don't be a spoilsport,” Henry interjects, and Regina falls silent with a sigh.

There is a point to this, of course. They'd found a species of purple wildflower on this planet which, when the petals are plucked and boiled, could cure over fourteen types of viral infection in over a dozen spacefaring species. But something—or, Emma had suspected, someone—had wiped out almost all the bees which pollinated the species, so the wildflower had almost died off completely. The bees were making a comeback, but they wouldn't be in time to save this last field of flowers, so the three of them had decided to step in.

Not that Regina had had any clue _how_ they were supposed to pollinate twenty square miles of dormant flowers on their own, but Emma had located—or stolen, more likely—three jars of invaluable pollen from _somewhere_ , meaning they'd just needed a quick way of dispersing the stuff before the planet's star set for the month-long night and the flowers went extinct at last. Anyway, Regina had found some horses, Henry had found the kites in Emma's Bug, and they had gone on their way.

Even now, though, an hour later, Regina still suspects that this whole setup is needlessly complicated, though, and this really is just an excuse for Emma to prove to a highly sceptical Regina that she _can_ ride a horse one-handed and then some. And Regina does has to admit grudgingly that Emma is good. Technically uncouth, of course, and Father would have all sorts of things to say about the way she's sitting in the saddle, but good enough—and, frankly, insane enough—to ride at decent speed one-handed across uneven ground.

“I think we're almost done,” Emma shouts over her shoulder as they round one rocky outcrop into the last patch of half-wilted purple. And a good thing too, as the sun is starting to set, the sky turning a deep purple, and the temperature is starting to drop precipitously. It's enough to spur them on to go a bit faster, both Regina and Henry spurring their horses onto a brisk trot. For Emma, it means a loud _hyah_ and a full, no-holds-barred gallop at full pace.

At a dangerous pace.

Regina, with all experience, notices it first—at that speed, on this sort of terrain, any sort of unexpected bump is enough to upset one's balance, especially when you've got a kite in one hand. And sure enough, she hears a loud whinnying as the stallion swerves to avoid a rock that had been almost invisible in the fading light, and Emma slides off the saddle.

“Emma! Look out!”

It's too late, though—Emma has nowhere near enough time to react before she goes sailing, flying through the air, over the rock the horse had tried to avoid and thudding to the ground, rolling over several times before coming to a final halt.

They watch in silence for a second, stunned. Then—

“ _Emma!_ ”

Kite abandoned, Regina rides at full tilt over to where Emma had been thrown. She dismounts as quickly as she can and sprints over to where Emma lies completely motionless. “Emma— _no—_ ”

Heart racing, breaths coming increasingly short and shallow, she crouches down over Emma and turns her over—and exhales a hundred breaths at once as Emma groans and curls up.

“Ow,” she whimpers, her eyes screwed shut. “That hurt.”

“You _idiot_ ,” Regina hisses, and Emma has the decency to look chastised even though she's obviously in pain. “What the hell was that for?”

“For fun?” Emma offers, and Regina considers punching her. “Probably won't do it again though. _Ow_ , my shoulder.”

Regina sighs with long, _long_ -suffering exasperation. “Is there anything I can do to help, or should I leave you with the consequences of your actions?”

Emma sits up now, massaging above her left shoulder with a grimace. “Sonic thingy. On my hip.”

Regina raises an eyebrow. “Thingy?”

“ _Regina._ You know which one I mean. _Quick._ ”

Regina sighs; she does know which one Emma means, but it's been weeks—months, if she's counting the time since the platform and the Syxoc—and she _still_ doesn't know what the buzzing lockpicker device is actually called. She suspects by now that Emma has no idea either. Either way, she retrieves it from the belt on Emma's hip and buzzes it at her injured shoulder, before showing her the small rectangular display on the side. Emma winces.

“Broken collarbone. Thought it might be that.”

Regina sighs—whether out of compassion, sheer frustration, or both, she isn't quite sure. It's probably both. “Do you need to go to a hospital or—”

“No,” Emma says quickly, sharply, but she quickly softens and smiles—to the extent that she can, anyway, given the obviously intense pain she's going through. She closes her eyes again. “Don't worry about it. It'll heal itself in a few days.”

Regina had been expecting that. “Can I at least get you some pain relief, or…?”

“If it's aspirin, it'll probably make it way worse. That stuff is super-toxic for Time Lords.”

Well, Regina hadn't been planning on asking about that, but she supposes it's good to know.

“How about morphine?” Not that she has any, but it's at least worth trying.

“Makes me nauseous. Also kind of toxic.”

Regina sighs. “Ibuprofen?”

“Doesn't work if you have two hearts.” Emma opens one eye, peers at Regina with curiosity. “You seem pretty across this stuff.”

“I have a ten year old son with a reckless streak and a tendency to explore places he probably shouldn't go,” Regina reminds her. “You learn.”

“Fair enough.”

At that point, said ten-year-old joins them. “Emma?” he asks, towering over them as he peers down from the colt's saddle with concern on his brow. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, kid,” Emma replies, though her voice is still thick, “but I think that'll be enough horse riding for me today.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding disappointed even on that one syllable. “Can I ride back to the Bug, though? This is really fun, mom.”

Regina hesitates briefly—instinctively, after seeing the riding accident she's loath to let her son continue, but he's both confident and competent. More importantly, unlike the Time Lady, he isn't a complete fool. “Of course, sweetheart. But quickly, before the sun sets.”

He beams at her and sets off, hoofs thudding softly in even time on the soft flowerbeds. Regina turns back to look at Emma, who is lying down again.

“How long do you think you'll need before you can move?” Regina asks.

Emma thinks it over for a few seconds. “Gimme twenty minutes, then I should be right. No horses, though.”

“I certainly wasn't suggesting it.” And they have no choice in the matter—both the stallion and the mare had departed of their own accord, presumably to find a nice cave to hibernate in before the temperature dropped too far. “That'll take us past sunset, though.”

“Eh, that's fine. It doesn't really get super cold for a few hours, and there's something I want to show you.”

“I told Henry to get to the Bug before sunset,” Regina points out—then remembers that the Bug is several miles away, and the local sun has just touched the horizon and is dropping fast. “I don't want him to wait too long for us.”

“Yeah, but you know him. He'll take a detour.”

“True.” Emma is still lying down, and although she looks calmer now, Regina knows better than to test the twenty minute estimate—if anything, it should probably longer. She slides over then lies down on the soft flower-grass on Emma's right side. “How did you make it this far anyway?”

Emma turns her head to look at Regina, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“First night I meet you, you've crashed your Bug and are about to go up in smoke. An hour later you almost get caught by a feelings-eater. Now you break your shoulder trying to fly a kite on horseback. I'm sensing a pattern here, Emma.”

Emma snorts, an irreverent smile playing on her features, brightening her face in a way that stops Regina from looking away. “Says the girl who tried to take on an Ice Warrior with a sonic gun and a sprained ankle.”

Regina zeroes in on the one word in that sentence which matters. “ _Girl?_ ”

Emma grins, and Regina is even more outraged.

“I am not a _girl,_ Miss Swan.”

“You might as well be to me. You're like less than half my age.”

“Oh.” Regina knows that Emma doesn't age, and that she'd only recently gained her current appearance, so that Emma would be considerably older than she looks is hardly surprising. It is startling to think about, though. “Is that… old by the standards of your people?”

Emma snorts again. “Most people on Gallifrey who are my age haven't even left Time Lord school yet.”

“Ah. So you're… basically a teenager?”

Emma pouts. “I am _not_ ,” she protests, which is all the confirmation Regina needs.

“And you call _me_ girl. Why do you even call yourself a Time Lady, anyway? You haven't even graduated yet.”

“It wasn't my choice, okay?” Emma says, still looking decidedly put out. “But after I got the Bug, everyone sort of… assumed I was one wherever I went, so it just stuck. Besides, most Time Lords I've met are pompous assholes. I'm much better.”

At that, Regina can't help but smile, reach between them to find Emma's free and unimpaired hand. “I'd like to think so.” She gives Emma's hand a quick squeeze, then lets go. “So what's it like, your home planet? Gallifrey?”

Emma barks a quick, sharp laugh. “Shitty.”

“Descriptive.”

“I'm being serious. Alright, it's eye-catching, I'll give it that, the sky and the red grass are pretty amazing. But most of it was destroyed ages ago in some war, and what's left of Time Lord society is pretty awful if you're an outsider like me. I mean—Earth isn't perfect, but I might as well have been born there and I made it okay, you know? Even New Prospect was better—harder, but better. The people there were real people, not stuck-up assholes. I didn't know that as a kid, though,” she says with a slightly bitter laugh. “Or I wouldn't have wasted so long trying to get to Gallifrey. God, I must've spent like ten years building that portal.”

“You just wanted to find your way home. It's natural.” Really, Regina is more impressed at a young Emma—presumably barely more than a child at that stage—working out who she was, what she was, where she needed to go and how to get there. Not for the first time, she wonders what sort of life Emma has led which has left her so blind to her own capabilities.

She's getting more of an inkling now, though.

Emma shakes her head. “Nah. Gallifrey isn't my home. Never was, never will be. Why do you think I stole the Bug?”

"And you wonder why they might be after you, prophecies aside."

"Well, that and the fact that I'm nosy. Time Lords aren't meant to interfere with stuff as much as we have." She shrugs. "Way I see it, I didn't pass the tests, so I don't have to play by their rules. It's probably a good thing that they have them, though, seeing what most of them are like."

“Still, they're your people, and everyone needs a home. Even if it's not what you thought it would be, everyone needs a place to come back to.”

Emma looks away, up at the near-blackened sky. “Yeah. Maybe one day.”

Regina keeps looking at Emma for the moment, her pale yet full, healthy cheeks, vibrant golden-blonde hair fanning out across the flowers, her lithe, thin frame. She looks no more than a young woman in her late twenties at the most, but Regina is starting to truly understand the life of loneliness, of hardship, of struggle and pain that had brought Emma to this point, and she's filled with the deep urge, a longing, to protect her from experiencing any more.

But she won't make promises she can't keep.

She looks away, up at the pitch-black sky, only a few pinpricks of starlight breaking through the darkness. “So what are we waiting for?”

“You'll see.”

Regina waits, somewhat sceptically, for a few more minutes. Nothing happens, and she's about to ask if there really is anything worth waiting for, and whether Emma's shoulder is sufficiently stabilised for them to escape the increasing chill and go back to the Bug where Regina's son is probably waiting—but then, out of the corner of her eye, a streak of brilliant green.

“What was that?”

“Watch,” Emma tells her, a small smile on her face.

Regina does—and another streak of light, this one thicker, lighter, criss-crosses the sky. Then another, and another, until the night sky is alive with dancing ribbons of vivid blue-green aurorae dancing above them.

“The magnetic field is locked to the sun,” Emma explains in a soft, light voice. “So when the sun sets, you get—this. It's beautiful, isn't it?”

Regina watches the brilliant bands of light for a few more seconds, then turns her head to look at her companion, sees Emma is already watching her.

“Yes, it is.”

 

* * *

 

It all becomes a sort of blur after that, a wash of colour and sound from places and times so extraordinary beyond her powers to describe.

They head back to Earth after the incident with the horse—with Emma's arm in a sling for the next two weeks or so, they decide that retreating to safer territory that they _all_ know where they're less likely to run into unexpected hazards is for the best. And besides, Emma _had_ promised Henry that she'd shown them her favourite sights on the planet she knows best.

 _Safe_ is a matter of degrees, though, as whilst it may not be running from monsters and supernovae, skiing is hardly safer than horse riding as a matter of course. Emma can't participate, though, so there's no threat of injury to her. Meanwhile, Henry turns out to be as naturally gifted at this as he had at riding a horse—a product of winter school camps, Regina suspects—and Regina frankly is too terrible at it to be in any real danger.

It's infuriating, really, listening to Henry and Emma whisper conspiratorially at each other as they watch her descend the very mild nursery slope at a ludicrously slow pace with gritted teeth, but until Regina learns how to actually _stop_ properly, this is the most she can do. At one point she loses slight control of her legs and they straighten unwittingly, and her pace doubles in a matter of seconds. She yelps, throwing her arms out to try and regain her balance, her skiis jinking left and right as she tries to regain control.

Eventually she rolls to a decidedly undignified stop, crouched over with her arms raised as if she's about to dive into the soft alpine snow, and she hears a suppressed snort from behind her.

“I heard that, Miss Swan!” she barks out, trying to crane her head to glare her most lethal glare at Emma—but in doing so, she loses what's left of her balance and she tumbles to the ground. “Oof!”

“Regina!” Emma rushes over, mirth gone. “Regina, are you okay?”

“I fell over, Emma, I didn't jump off a cliff,” Regina says acidly, but she lets Emma pull her back upright anyway. “I don't understand how Henry is so good at this.”

The two of them look up at the steeper, intermediate-level piste to see Henry smoothly descending the mountain, elegantly sliding from left to right as needed across the soft snow.

“Kid's a natural, I guess,” Emma says with a shrug. “Anyway, if you want to try something else—”

Regina is already making her way back to the top of the slope.

It's worth it in the end. It takes a full week and more of intensive practice, but eventually she gains enough confidence to join Henry on his ski runs down the mountainside. It's honestly kind of terrifying the first few times, particularly when compounded with Regina's nervousness around heights. But by now Emma's collarbone has healed enough—not completely healed, but healed enough—to join her, and as with most things having Emma around helps. Moreover, it turns out that this is one pastime where Emma has a comparable lack of skill, so Regina is hardly alone when she takes a turn too sharply and ends up spitting out mouthfuls of snow.

“You guys okay?” Henry asks, frowning at them as he rounds the corner and skids to a halt between them. Emma had stacked slightly lower down, so this time she's the one to get a second helping of fresh snow, kicked up by the blades of Henry's skis. She doesn't react outwardly, just glances at Regina—and immediately, somehow, Regina knows what she's thinking.

Without any further ado, they seize Henry's arms and _pull_.

He's so surprised that he doesn't have time to protest before he too is presented with a faceful of snow, spluttering with confusion as he lifts his head back, spits out chunks of fresh snow and blinks his eyes clear.

Emma is laughing her head off, Regina herself can't help but laugh herself, and before long Henry joins in, his high-pitched giggle sitting perfectly between Emma's barking peals and Regina's low, deep amusement. And Regina can't help but think that this, _this_ is good, this is _perfect,_ the three of them sitting on the mountainside, face and hair covered in snow, laughing until they can barely breathe.

 

* * *

 

And that's what matters, really. Through it all, amidst _all of time and space_ her son is laughing, her son is smiling, and that remains the most important gift that Emma has given to Regina.

"Thank you," she tells Emma quietly, as Henry happily— _happily_ —eats ice-cream whilst dangling his legs over the edge of an observation platform into space, the swirling colours of a glowing nebula surrounding them. "For doing this for us."

"Any time," Emma says, thumbs in the pockets of her coat. "It's the least I could do."

"You've more than repaid anything you owed me. This is—" She stops, wets her lips. "I haven't seen Henry this happy in a long time."

Emma gives a small smile, the kind which makes her whole face look that little bit brighter. Regina has met all types during her life, both through her family connections and her political career, but the sincerity, the _honesty_  on Emma's face at moments like these is something she's only ever really seen on—well, on her son, and Regina can’t help but be drawn towards it, towards _her._

"I'm glad. I want you guys to be happy."

Regina looks away, though she can still feel Emma's eyes on her. "He's very enamoured with you, you know. He talks about you even more than he did while you were gone."

"So you guys are talking again?"

Regina waits, watches her son for a few seconds—then sighs. "In a sense. He'll talk to me for hours about you, about this—" She motions around her. "But if I try to talk about anything important..."

A hand on her shoulder. "I get it, believe me—"

"No, you don't," Regina interrupts sharply, then softens her voice. "It's—him being adopted is part of it, obviously, but that's not the main thing."

Emma is silent, and Regina knows that she doesn't have to continue this conversation, she doesn't have to _share—b_ ut what good has hiding the truth done for her these last two months? Besides, if she can trust Emma with her life and her son's life, she can trust her with her heart too, her secrets.

"It started some time back, actually. When I was elected Mayor, he was excited at first—as you'd expect—but then when I took office, the late nights started." She looks down at her feet. "He's never had that many friends, and—I wonder now, if I made a mistake, keeping him so close when he just a child."

"You love him," Emma says gently. "It's natural to hold on too tight when you're scared it might go away."

Regina looks up again—she's again reminded that this woman who spends half her time as a ball of nervous energy has a story of her own, memories rich and coloured in ways Regina doesn't yet fully understand; though part of her wants to know it all, every secret wish made upon a star, every unshared hope whispered over a lone birthday candle.

Oh, how she wants to know.

"In any case. On the surface he seemed understanding but—but deep down I don't think he did, after a few months. He grew distant, not understanding and, eventually, angry. Not at me at first but—but at his situation, at his sense that he didn't have a mother half the time and didn't understand why. So he went looking for answers and he—" She laughs a bitter, hurt laugh. "He found them."

Emma doesn't respond, but Regina feels the hand on her shoulder tighten ever-so-subtly. She closes her eyes, trying to dam the tears she knows are coming.

"I know now that I didn't react well. I know I should have—I should have been _honest_  with him, and my attempts to fix things and make it all go away just made him angrier," she says, her voice cracking. "But I was just—I was just so _scared_ of losing him that I—"

"You ended up pushing him away anyway."

Regina nods, wipes her eyes. "I suppose you think I'm stupid, doing that."

Emma frowns. “Why would I think that? Like I said, it's natural to be scared in that kind of situation. Okay, you made mistakes, but everyone does that.”

“ _You_ wouldn't have. You would have fought and found a way, like you always seem to do,” Regina says, trying her utmost to keep any and all trace of bitterness out of her voice—but at first, she thinks she's failed, because Emma's hand falls from her shoulder and she looks away. “Emma?”

Emma doesn't look back or react, just watches Henry with that distant expression—a troubled look, Regina realises, and at the same moment knows that her words had dragged up something deeper.

“What is it?” Regina hesitates—then reaches up to close her hand about Emma's upper arm, feels the coiled tension in Emma's muscles. “You can tell me, if you want.”

Emma shakes her head, but then looks back at Regina with a small smile. “It's nothing, it's just—it's weird hearing you say stuff like that, you know?”

Regina frowns. “Why would that be weird?”

Emma looks away again. “It's just that—when you say things like that, you almost make me think I could be a real mother.”

Regina is even more nonplussed now. “And you don't think you can?” When Emma doesn't answer, Regina shakes her head. “Emma, I see you with Henry every day. You're wonderful with him, and you were wonderful with Gretel. Why don't you think you could ever have a child of your own?”

“Because I already have one.”

Regina stops. “What?”

Emma looks down at the floor, shifts her weight on her feet awkwardly. “You remember how I said I dated someone on Earth? A human?”

Regina nods slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on Emma. Emma swallows visibly, continues, “Well. I was young—like, _really_ young by Time Lord standards, and I was stupid and I—” She closes her eyes, screws up her face in self-berating pain, “I got myself pregnant.”

“You mean _he_ got you pregnant,” Regina corrects, then zeroes in on the most obviously out of place thing that Emma had revealed to her. “I wouldn't have thought that was possible.”

“Neither did I.” She covers her face with her hands, speaks muffled words into her palms. “God, I didn't even _think_ that—I was careless and stupid and suddenly I—I had this _kid_ who was half-human, half Time Lord.”

Regina stares at her, her mouth hanging slightly open in shock—and then a terrible, awful thought hits her. “What happened to the child? Did it—”

“Oh—no, the kid's fine,” Emma says quickly, uncovering her face to reveal wet, glazed eyes. “Or, I mean, it was fine. The doctors I talked to thought it was just a normal human baby until I told them. Anyway, I gave it up for adoption the moment I was sure it'd be okay.”

Regina breathes again, her heart rate slows, but her frown remains. "And you haven't been in contact?"

"Nope. Don't know anything about it. Don't know where it is, don't know who adopted it, don't know it's name. I don't even know if it's a boy or a girl."

“But why? Why would you cut yourself off like that? Why didn't you feel you could raise it yourself?”

Emma laughs, bitter and hurt. “Look at me, Regina. I don't have parents. I don't have family. I don't even have a _home_ which isn't a half-broken time machine, and I—I'm a _mess_ , Regina. I'm barely older than a Time Lord teenager and I've already lost a regeneration. I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life running from a prophecy I can never actually read. I'd have _no_ idea what to do with a child.”

“Neither did I when I adopted Henry,” Regina points out. “It's not something you can read out of a book.”

Emma wipes her eyes, shakes her head. “I know, but—I just wanted the kid to have its best chance, you know? Same as you do with Henry, just—a bit different, I guess. But we're in the same boat here. I mean—I guess that's why I'm so invested in you and Henry. I think that a part of me reckons that if you guys are doing okay, that makes it more likely that my kid is doing okay with whoever is raising him and it—it makes me feel like I haven't fucked up as bad, I guess.”

Regina wants to argue the point, bring up a hundred moments she's witnessed between Emma and Henry already and cite them as evidence of just how _wrong_ Emma is about this, about herself—but she looks at Emma now, at the fragile brightness of her eyes, those of a young, lost girl, but also the crinkles of skin around her sad smile worn by years and years of heartache and loneliness, and she doesn't.

“Do you still think about it? Your child?”

Emma turns, watches Henry again, now chasing a flight of space butterflies which had congregated around the platform. “Every single day.”

Regina turns and looks at her son, smiling at him as he laughs, the butterflies flittering in circles around him.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little smutty. Nothing explicit, of course, and not enough to bump up the rating in my view, but it's there.

That night, Regina dreams of Emma, Henry and the stars.

It's a strange dream to have, really. It makes the lines between waking reality and slumbering imagination kind of blurred when dreams start looking exactly the same as the real world—but there are subtle differences, and important ones. For one thing, the three of them are standing hand in hand with Regina in the middle, Emma on her left and Henry on her right. And that's all they're doing, really, standing there and watching the infinite turn of stars and galaxies and pulsars and quasars—

Until they're interrupted by a voice behind them.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?”

The three of them spin around to see an immaculately dressed middle-aged woman with brown, ornately done-up hair and an unnaturally bright sparkle in her eyes. She's holding a small sphere, an orb in her hand which pulsates and shines a vibrant golden-yellow, and Regina is transfixed.

“Mother?” she whispers.

Cora smile brightens, and Emma steps forward, pushing Regina and Henry behind her and shielding them with her body—but Cora simply laughs and squeezes the orb in her hand. At that instant, Emma is lifted bodily into the air as if hung from an invisible rope. Regina watches helplessly as Emma's body jerks about, a thin, glowing mist of minuscule golden particles rises from her before being sucked inexorably into the orb.

Cora squeezes the orb again, now even brighter than before, and the mist vanishes. Emma drops from the air and collapses to the ground like a rag doll, her face vacant, her still-open eyes sightless, her mouth half-open even as no air passes between the lips.

“ _Emma!_ ”

Cora laughs and laughs and laughs as Regina cradles Emma's dead— _dead, dead, she's dead—_ body, rocking it from side to side between great, wracking sobs, screaming at her dear mother.

“ _Why?_ ”

Cora just laughs again, high and terrible. “Don't you remember, Regina? I promised you the stars, and we keep our promises in this family.”

She turns to face Henry, who had watched the scene without reacting, like a statue, and squeezes the orb again. Regina opens her mouth to scream—

 

* * *

 

—and wakes, her eyes flying open and her body heaving upright. She presses her hand to her heart, beating so fast that it _hurts,_ and for a moment she wonders if it had split and multiplied. But as her breathing settles, she remembers herself again, remembers that it had been a dream and _not real—_ but then she throws the blankets off and tears out of her room, as she _has to be sure._

She first runs—sprints, really—to Henry's room, driven by that singularly terrifying image of that orb, that golden light, her _Mother_ —but she sees that Henry is safe and sound, snoring contentedly in his room, and she sighs with relief.

Then she remembers the rest of the dream.

She hurtles down the corridor towards the console room, unsure where she's going—she has no idea where Emma's room is—and not really caring, as all she can see is Emma's body in the air, Emma falling to the ground, Emma _dead—_

But then she reaches the console room and stops dead in her tracks.

“Regina?” Emma looks up from the central console, frowning with puzzlement. “What's wrong? It's like, three a.m. Why aren't you asleep?”

Regina's hand goes back to her heart and she exhales a sigh, letting out several breaths she hadn't been aware of holding. “Nothing. Why aren't _you_ asleep?” she shoots back, more comfortable on the offense as usual.

Emma shrugs. “I don't need as much sleep as you guys. I keep myself busy instead, sort stuff out.”

“Ah.” Regina should have guessed. Her breathing now settled but her heart and mind still racing, she decides to descend down to Emma's level—and as she does so, she notices that Emma's dressed even more casually than usual, in a loose white tank and slacks, her blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders in waves, free of makeup or her usual leather jacket armour, and she looks—well. Open. “A Time Lady thing?”

“Pretty much. I would've told you guys, but I didn't want Henry to know or he literally would refuse to go to sleep ever.”

The two of them laugh, Emma throwing her head back as Regina joins her at the central console, their shoulders bumping. “That he would.” She looks up at the screen in front of her, spends a few seconds watching the arcane symbols slide across it, strange and detailed interlocking circles rotating left and right. “So this is...”

“Gallifreyan, yeah. The language of the Time Lords—or at least, one version of it. There are other forms, but I don't understand them.”

“It's very beautiful,” Regina murmurs softly, entranced by the dancing circular letters—symbols? Words? She doesn't know.

Emma snorts. “Beautiful, but stupidly impractical and hard to read. I'd change the default settings to English, but I haven't worked out how to do that in the manual.”

Regina frowns at her, unsure how that could be case—but then remembers Emma's words about _other forms_ and makes the connection. “Because you can't read it.” Well, that would at least explain why the Bug is so faulty.

Emma looks put out. “I didn't go to Time Lord school, okay? I only know how to read this, and also a bunch of Earth languages because I spent so much time there when I was young.”

“I understand,” Regina says with a gentle smile, and she _does_. It makes sense given what she knows of Emma's upbringing—or lack thereof—and she's seen the woman fluently converse in more than a dozen languages _without_ the help of the Bug's translation matrix, so she's still suitably impressed. “So what's it say?” she asks, nodding at the screen and the symbols still scrolling across it.

To her surprise, Emma goes slightly pink. “You don't want to know that.”

Regina raises an eyebrow. “Emma.”

Emma swallows, goes even pinker. “You _don't_ , trust me, it's—”

“ _Emma._ ”

The colouration on Emma's cheeks is now impressively intense, and she ducks her head down, hiding her face a little behind her cascading curls of hair. Regina just keeps her eyes fixed on her, waiting, but she's smiling as a warmth, a sensation she can't even describe fills her to her fingertips. Emma mumbles something inaudible.

Regina puts a hand to her ear. “Pardon?”

“I—I was looking for a—a gift,” Emma stammers, only just loud enough for Regina to hear. “You know—for your birthday.”

And whatever Regina had been expecting, it had _not_ been this. Her eyes go a little wide, her voice goes high and quiet. “My—my birthday? But I haven't even told you when that is.”

Emma continues staring resolutely at her own feet. “I know, I checked. It's in a month, right? I mean, if I have the count right—it's hard to keep track in here sometimes.”

Regina's mouth is still hanging open with surprise as she nods. “Yes—a _month,_ Emma.”

Emma peeks up at Regina through her eyelashes, looking young and vulnerable, and Regina feels the sensation inside her, the _fondness_ intensifying—along with something else entirely. “I—I know. But I'm really, _really_ bad at gifts and I want to get this right for you and I didn't have anything else to do so—”

Regina places her palm on Emma's cheek to lift her head back up, and Emma shuts up immediately, her breath hitching audibly. For a moment, they stay like that, Regina gazing straight into Emma's glimmering, bright eyes, Emma gazing back with that confused puppy frown Regina has seen _so_ often on her—

And then Regina kisses her.

There's a sharp, shocked intake of breath from Emma, enough to give Regina pause—but then Emma reciprocates, immediately opening her mouth, deepening the kiss as her hands rise to cradle Regina's cheeks. Regina's eyes flutter closes and she sinks into the kiss, drowning in it, in _her_ , feeling the kiss intensity, letting Emma take the sensations higher and higher.

By the time they part, a minute—or maybe an hour or even a week—later, Regina's cheeks are well and truly flushed and she's slightly breathless, her head spinning up into the stars and galaxies she knows are surrounding the little car floating through space. But Emma's eyes are calm and peaceful even as they shine, shine in the omnipresent glow of the console room, glittering with promise.

“Come with me,” she murmurs, and leads Regina by the hand back up the stairs.

 

* * *

 

Regina wakes a few hours later to the ugliest ceiling she's ever seen.

It's not so much that it's chipped and patchy, the clear after-effects of years and years of the room having been in use, but it's the colour—a horrible, garish sort of yellow, remarkably similar to the equally unsightly hue on the outside of the Bug. It certainly isn't a colour she'd accept for her own room, and she wonders how she'd fallen asleep here in the first place—then she remembers.

She smiles and closes her eyes again, letting the memories wash over her: the sneaking back to Emma's—of _course_ it's Emma's—room, punctuating by kissing breaks; the gentle bickering and teasing as they'd removed each other's clothes, piece by piece; the way Emma had just stopped, _stopped_ , to admire Regina's body as she'd laid back on Emma's bed and the way the Regina had done the same in turn; the joy, the _laughter_ as they'd brought each other to ever-increasing heights of pleasure—

She feels it now, of course, a generalised but decidedly pleasant soreness between her legs and little bright sparkles dotted across her upper body and back that Emma had left with teeth and nails. Her smile broadens, she throws an arm across to the other side of the bed—but only finds an empty space and a still-warm divot. She half-opens her eyes to see Emma at the wardrobe mirror in the middle of dressing herself. For a few minutes she admires the sight, Emma still half-naked as she puts on a shirt, starts buttoning it up.

“Why the rush?” Regina murmurs, her voice still drowsy and slurred. Emma turns around to face Regina, her shirt still half-open to reveal a series of red marks trailing down the top of her chest— _ah._ Turtlenecks for both of them today, then.

“Sorry—I thought you were still sleeping,” Emma says, smiling softly back. She shuffles over, sits down on the side of the bed. Regina pushes herself up to a sitting position and lets the blanket strategically fall off her chest, notes immediately how Emma's pupils dilate and her breath hitches.

“Woke up,” Regina replies, still feeling too sleepy and, well, _warm_ to bother with complete sentences. She reaches up to start fiddling with the few buttons on Emma's shirt are actually done up. “Was watching.”

“What, admiring the view?”

Regina laughs, rolling and comfortable. “Mm, something like that. Much nicer than your ceiling.”

Emma frowns. “What's wrong with my ceiling?”

“Yellow, Emma. Seriously.”

“What's wrong with yellow? I like yellow—the Bug is yellow!”

“And if I hadn't known that it was stolen, I would have started to seriously question your taste.”

“You _are_ questioning my taste! It's really rude, you know, lying here in _my_ bed in _my_ room and insulting my colour choices—”

Regina pulls her down and kisses her deeply, cutting her off mid-complaint. “Better?” she murmurs against Emma's lips once they part, and Emma's eyes are sparkling again, as they had done a few hours before.

“Much,” Emma replies, quickly returns the kiss, slowly presses Regina back onto the bed. “Mm, you were good last night.”

“So were you.” She puts her hand on Emma's shoulders and pushes her back, but only so Emma can straddle her waist properly. “You could have told me you had experience with women before.”

Emma snorts, tosses her hair back. “Do I _look_ straight to you, Regina?”

And that is _totally_ not fair, not when Emma is wearing nothing but a bra and an unbuttoned shirt—“You only mentioned an ex-boyfriend. You could have at _least_ told me that you were interested in women too—”

Emma grinds down on Regina's hips, rolls them _exactly_ onto that spot where Regina can already feel heat pooling, and all the breath leaves Regina's body in an instant. “ _One_ ex-boyfriend. Haven't had any after that. Though I can tell you about doing  _all_ kinds of girls from all kinds of different races—”

Regina groans and yanks Emma down for another, much more heated kiss. She slips her hands under Emma's shirt and slides it off her shoulders, pushing up with her hips and smiling against Emma's lips when she hears Emma gasp—

“Emma?”

There's a tentative knocking on the closed—and mercifully locked—door, and Emma sits up immediately. Regina sighs to herself, but otherwise keeps completely quiet and still as Emma pushes herself off the bed, straightening out her hair and putting her shirt back on.

“Yeah, Henry?” Emma asks as she moves back to the wardrobe, starts re-buttoning her shirt. 

“Have you seen my mom? I've been looking for her for, like, twenty minutes.”

Regina freezes, her breath catches—and from the suddenly pale, wide-eyed expression on Emma's face as she meets Regina's eye, she feels roughly the same. “Uh—no, I, uh, haven't,” she gabbles, her voice unnaturally high. “Maybe she's taking a really long shower? Or she tried to go down to the console room and got lost. Just hang on, give me a few minutes and I'll look for her.”

There's a long, long silence. Regina is almost convinced that he's accepted Emma's words and left, when—“She's in there, isn't she?”

Emma winces, covers her face with her hand. “Yeah, kid. She is.”

For a moment, Regina is terrified, truly terrified, in a singular way that she's very rarely been before. She'd agreed to let him come aboard for _him_ , to show how much _his_ happiness means to her, but if he now suspects that she has ulterior motives in letting them travel with Emma—

“Oh,” he says simply, accepting, and Regina breathes again. “Cool. I'll see you guys in a bit, then, yeah?”

Emma sighs, but Regina can see her smiling as she shares another look with Regina, filled with that same promise as they had in the console room a few hours before, albeit with less heat, less immediacy. _Another time._

“Give us a few minutes and we'll be downstairs.”

 

* * *

 

Nonetheless, Regina is still nervous when she finally makes her way downstairs, having showered alone— _alone_ , or Emma will distract her so badly with her presence that they’ll never make it down—and pulled on a woollen turtleneck sweater which hides most of the more obvious marks.

Both she and Emma eat breakfast in a vaguely awkward silence, trying their utmost not to make eye contact as Henry tells them about the research he’d done a few nights back on the Arthonian dynasty on Kalinar, a planet of little knee-high fuzzballs which he wants to visit today. It’s tricky, though, because Emma’s shirt is still a little loose, revealing a purpling bruise on her upper chest which Regina clearly remembers making—or _,_ more accurately, remembers the noise Emma had made when Regina's mouth had—

“So,” Henry says brightly, nibbling on his second piece of jam-on-toast, “you two slept together, huh?”

Emma goes an intense shade of red, verging on scarlet. “That’s not—I—”

“Emma, I’m ten, not dumb,” he says smugly, and he has never sounded like Regina’s son any more than he does right now. “I know you like my mom, and she likes you back."

Emma still looks profoundly embarrassed, and she only looks at Henry through her eyelashes as she says, “I mean—yeah, your mom and I are—we're a thing now, I guess. You’re okay with this, right? I mean, we just want the best for you and we don’t want to mislead you into thinking this is anything more than it is when we don’t even know yet—”

“ _Emma_ ,” Regina cuts her off warningly before she can babble further and say anything too dangerous, and Emma clamps her mouth shut immediately. Henry, though, just looks at her with that little slanted smile of his.

“It’s fine. I just want you both to be happy.”

Emma looks up, surprised yet sporting a small, hopeful smile, and Regina marvels at her son’s ability to say exactly the right things at exactly the right time. Still, though, she watches Emma with silent apprehension as she goes throughout her business like she’s walking on crushed glass with too-thin sandals through the remainder of breakfast, and she slides next to Emma when Henry departs to take a morning bath.

“Can we talk?” she says quietly as she places Henry’s dishes in the sink.

“We probably should,” Emma says with a short, brittle laugh, then glances up at Regina and—oh _god,_ she’s _terrified._ “Listen, if you just want to—”

“If this sentence ends with 'keep it to just sex', then count me out, Emma,” Regina says, low and firm. “I'm not interested.”

Emma looks like she might shatter with a single touch, and Regina has to fight the urge to hold her still, hold her steady. “Oh—okay, if you're not interested in me any more, then—”

“Are you kidding, Emma?” Regina interrupts, despite knowing full well that Emma is _not_ kidding, not here, not now. “Of course I'm interested in _you_. But I—it has to be _real_ , Emma. Not just sleeping around at night and pretending that nothing happened during the day.”

Emma's eyes go very wide, very round. “Oh. So—so a relationship, then?”

Regina can already hear Mother's voice in her head, whispering, corrupting—but she breathes in, breathes out, forces it away. “A relationship. If _you're_ interested, of course.”

“Yeah— _yeah_ ,” Emma repeats, her voice almost comically high and fast. “I—I'd like that, a lot. I mean, I don't want to say I've been thinking about this since I first met you but I kind of have, and last night was sort of amazing and I'd like to have more of that, although obviously I'm not just into you because of the sex—”

“Hush,” Regina says, stopping Emma's blubbering by placing a single finger on her lips. She's smiling like a fool, she knows, amused and fond and _warm_ , and she's tempted, so tempted, to remove her finger and replace it with her own lips instead—but down that path lies danger, mostly to her son whom she assumes will be back at any time now and she doesn't quite want to scar for life yet. Maybe soon. “I don't have to ask if _you're_ interested in this, then.”

Surprisingly, the light in Emma's eyes fade a little, the colour drains slightly from her cheeks. She clasps Regina's hand that had been near her mouth, moves it down to her chest. Under her curled-up fingers, Regina can feel a heartbeat of four. “I mean—yeah. I am, a lot. But this—this isn't _safe_ , you know? There's, like, a million ways this could go horribly wrong.”

“You've been saying that for months, and yet we're still here. I know the risks, Emma.”

“Do you?” Emma asks quietly, and her gaze is sharp and hard. “Do you really? Let's just say it goes _perfectly_ for us, and neither of us gets killed and we don't get bored or hate each other or anything,” she says, with totally unnecessary scepticism in Regina's opinion. “You're, what, thirty-something?”

“Thirty-nine,” Regina says shortly, looking down and starting to wipe down Henry's dish. “I thought you knew this. You know my birthday, after all.”

“Just checking,” Emma says with a shrug. “Anyway, normally that'd mean that you'd have about fifty years left of, you know. Your life. With special tech you could probably push that closer to a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty max.”

Regina blinks—when Emma puts it that way, it sounds like she's barely at the starting line, but Emma's mood is far too sombre for it to be so simple. “And… that's not enough? Most humans would kill for a two hundred year life.”

“I know, I've met enough,” Emma says with a small, fleeting smile. “But to me? That's _nothing_. That could be the blink of an eye. I don't really age properly, remember? So I could easily last _thousands_ of years on a single life—and I have plenty more after that, unless something _really_ bad happens to me.”

Regina blinks. “Oh,” she says, very very quietly. “And—and you'd still willing to go for it? Even knowing that it could be like _that_ for you?” Regina can barely imagine the magnitude, the _enormity_ of it, having love and knowing that it'll be gone, it'll just wither away in a relative instant—

“Before? Not a chance in hell,” Emma says with another bitter laugh. “Being semi-immortal in a universe filled with mortals isn't great for your romantic life. Especially when basically all the other immortals are dickheads—trust me on that one, I've tried.”

“I'll bear that in mind,” Regina jokes. She can feel hope growing within her like the first shoots of grass after the drought-breaking storm, but she doesn't dare fall to it. Yet. “So why...”

“I care about you and Henry,” Emma says softly, and she's so transparent at that moment Regina wonders if she'll turn to crystal, multicoloured and dazzling. “More than I've ever cared about anyone, I think, and that makes me want to try. I could be wrong, and this could all be a horrible mistake that we'll have to undo and I'll be honest with you if it is but—but I want to try. Is that okay?” she asks shyly, blinking at Regina through trembling eyelashes, her face obscured a little behind a curtain of vibrant golden-blonde hair.

Regina pulls their joined hands up to her lips, drops kisses on Emma's knuckles, and Emma smiles.

 

* * *

 

So they try.

They try and they try and they try and—and it _works._ Days turn into weeks into months, and it works beyond any expectations or hopes that Regina could have possibly had. It's like Regina's been transported to a dream, a dream where Emma buys her the richest, most velvety chocolate she's ever tasted on New Earth. A dream where Emma takes them to see the first of the virtual reality Star Wars movies, which Regina not-so-secretly enjoys even more than Henry. A dream where Henry smiles at the two of them with open delight as they walk hand-in-hand down the hill path to a festival celebrating the alignment of fourteen different galaxies—and even disregarding everything else, that smile alone is enough to make this all worthwhile, if in a very unexpected way.

“Unexpected?” Emma asks, as they watch Henry play tag with Catherine de Medici, currently all of six years old, in the grounds of her palace in sixteenth-century Florence which are still glistening with spring rains that had just passed over. “He said he was cool with this.”

“He's okay with you being as gay as gay can be, which is unsurprising as he's known _that_ about me since the age of three,” Regina points out evenly. “And us having a fling with each other because we're attractive and attracted. That's not the same thing as being okay with what we're going for now.”

“Why wouldn't he be?” Emma asks, frowning. Regina can think of a thousand different reasons why, but she doesn't share them as she's sure that Emma knows them all anyway—for one thing, they're just a thousand ways to express the same reason. “I'm happy, you're happy—right?”

Regina nods.

“Right, so—that's all he wants for us, really. To be happy, like he said. For you especially—you're his mom, after all.”

Not so long but a whole world ago, Regina wouldn't have believed her. Not so long ago, Regina wouldn't have bought for a single _second_ that Henry is at all invested in Regina's happiness—but that had been before Emma had come back, before _this_. “ _His_ happiness still probably doesn't involve me being around in his eyes, though. That's the problem."

Emma's hand finds Regina's, closes around it. “It will. Give him time, you guys have already come so far.”

And they have, that's the thing. They _have_ come so far; Henry is smiling, truly smiling at her again, casually asking her for help and not recoiling when she tucks him into bed, he rarely gets angry more except righteously so at some galling injustice they just _have_ _to fix,_ _mom,_ and they haven't even argued about anything more serious than shower lengths in weeks. Regina is no fool, and she isn't under any illusions as to what this is and what still lies underneath, but she'll take this. She'll take sharing this impossible dream with her son, she'll take celebrating his birthday and her birthday and Emma's birthday—the first time Emma has celebrated that day with anyone else in decades, Emma admits quietly to her that night with a tearful smile, and Regina had drawn her in and held her tight—and Christmas thrice over in some distant, far-off paradise; she'll take all of this.

There are dangers, of course. There's the regular assortment of monsters, evil super-villains and astro-engineering projects gone horribly wrong to contend with, and by Regina's count they save no fewer than six species, fourteen planets and two universes—well, actually, just  _this_ universe, but twice over—from destruction in the six months since she and Emma had first hooked up. It gives Regina a certain satisfaction that together, the three of them can accomplish  _anything_ , and it makes all the risks they take worthwhile.

They  _are_ serious threats, mind, none more so than the Dalek they stumble across whilst visiting Seoul. It takes them until the firing starts to actually realise it, though.

"How the hell does that thing have a  _gun?_ " Regina hisses as they flee from the metallic creature and its endless screeches of  _exterminate, exterminate!_ "It looks like an upside-down rubbish bin!"

"I don't know, but apparently they keep trying to take over the universe," Emma answers, sounded distinctly harried. She points up a set of stairs. "This way, it can't follow us here."

Anyway. They deal with it eventually by luring it off a skyscraper, and other than a particularly surreal and unpleasant encounter with a colony of ghosts on Lambda Six, they don't ever come closer to ruin that that, and they all make it through it one piece. So the dream continues. 

 

* * *

 

And Regina takes every second of it, especially the nights; while the days belong to all three of them, shared between this odd little entity Regina is increasingly thinking of as  _her family_ , the night's are Emma's and Regina's alone. They don't actually spend them sleeping around, generally speaking—they have so many other things to do which are frankly better than sex, as good as that is, and they take full advantage of the fact that Henry is asleep to go to even more astonishing destinations, particularly of a more romantic or burlesque nature. Nowhere especially dangerous, though—it wouldn't do to leave him abandoned and motherless so far from home, but even that turns out okay.

By avoiding entanglements, it diverts the focus from whatever madcap adventure they'd usually be on during the day and inwards to _them_ alone. And of course, there's still things like river cruises on the Seine in 17th century Paris, or visits to the Orient Express—the one in space, that is—or quiet trips to the tallest peak in the Milky Way, a mountain so high it juts out into space... and Regina treasures every moment of it.

Of course, there's also generally the part where they sneak up to Regina's room— _Regina's_ room, because that yellow is _such_ a turn-off—most nights, giggling like schoolgirls and shushing each other despite the fact that Henry surely knows full-well what they're doing, and do basically everything other than sleep there.

Regina does still manage to sleep a few hours each night, though. Despite the fact that they'd resolved not to mention their species difference in the context of their relationship again, Regina is still very much aware that she's human and she therefore needs sleep that Emma doesn't. Though that means that Emma has time to drop out after Regina has fallen asleep from sheer satisfied exhaustion and buy gifts for her.

At least, Emma claims they're gifts. Regina has other ideas.

“What is _that?_ ” Regina asks as she pushes herself a little higher in her bed, her mouth hanging slightly open, having spent the last ten seconds blinking at the _thing_ on Emma's head.

“It's a kalethroneus!” Emma says brightly—though not as brightly as her hat, which Regina decides would be called a bowler hat were it not lighting up. And constantly changing colours. The word, however, makes no sense at all, and Regina blinks again.

“A what? _”_

“Ka-le-thron-e-us. It's a hat.”

“I never would have guessed,” Regina remarks, and Emma glares at her—or maybe she's glaring at her chest. On balance, it's probably her chest. “What _is_ it?”

“It reads your thoughts and turns them into colours. They're randomised, though, so you can't, like, read someone's mind by looking at your hat. I reckon it's cool, and I thought you might like it.”

And there's something about it, something about the combination of the _ridiculousness_ of the gesture and the fact that Emma had gone to some way-off planet, looked at this thing, and wondered what _Regina_ would think of it that makes Regina sit up straight, straight enough to pull Emma down by the hand and into a deep, open-mouthed kiss. Emma reciprocates immediately and eagerly, and soon they're both falling back onto the bed, Regina rolling them over so Emma's body is trapped under hers, her already-pink face haloed by golden-blonde hair as the multicoloured hat rolls onto the floor, forgotten.

“Henry'll be up soon,” Emma reminds her, although the thickness of her voice tells Regina that she'd done that merely out of duty. She opens Emma's shirt, starts kissing her way down Emma's jaw, her collarbone, her chest.

“So we'll be quick,” Regina murmurs against the swell of Emma's left breast, and Emma laughs.

They are, unfortunately, not quick, and two hours later they're down at the console room with still-flushed faces and tousled hair, trying to not meet either each other's eyes and _definitely_ not trying to meet Henry's eyes as he inspects them with gleeful smugness.

“So you guys are really having fun, huh?” he comments when Emma reappears from her shower, no longer looking so obviously like someone who had spent most of the last few hours—well. Regina would rather not think too specifically about that, not when her son is both shrewd and all too delighted to make fun of them. “I'd be happy for you guys if I wasn't too busy throwing up, because ew.”

Emma whacks him playfully on the shoulder, suppressing a smile even as she attempts to glare at him. Regina is standing in the opposite corner of the room—the one that's been more or less marked out as Regina's corner of the console room, as it's actually tidy unlike the rest—and doing her hair using a wall mirror the Bug had helpfully provided. She glares at Emma.

“Do _not_ assault my son, Miss Swan,” she says sharply. Emma knows that there's no feeling behind the warning, though, and proves it by sticking out her tongue at Regina, a phenomenally childish gesture which is studiously ignored. “Although, Henry, make another joke like that again and you're grounded for the day.”

“Aw, _Mom_ , come on,” Henry whines. “It's only fair after you guys kept me waiting for like an hour and a half doing… whatever it is you guys were doing,” he finishes, scrunching up his face in exaggerated distaste.

“Well, it won't happen again,” she declares. “The waiting, I mean,” she adds, mostly to get rid of the brief albeit hilarious panic which had momentarily appeared on Emma's face. “Now, where are we going again?”

Emma still looks a little put out, but she pulls down a screen regardless. "Dunno. We could go to Corsica, which I really liked that the last time I was there, or New Corsica, which is okay, I guess, but only if you _really_ like rain, or New New Corsica, which I've heard is kind of amazing. Or we could go to the Library—that's literally what the planet is called, the Library, mostly because the entire planet is just—"

The Bug lands suddenly, cutting Emma off mid-sentence and throwing them all to the floor, and goes dead. Completely dead. The screens are blank, the usual whirr that emanates from the column in the middle of the room is absent, and all the lights—indeed, any sign of power electrical or otherwise—are off, leaving them all in near-total darkness.

"Mom?" Henry asks, his voice high and quavering. "What's going on?" 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some violence and stuff some people might find disconcerting (as this subplot is all about fear—snakes and hospitals being two of them) depicted in the next two chapters. None of it is real, however, and certainly not permanent in any way.
> 
> Full disclosure: both the nature and the setting of this next adventure are directly inspired by _The God Complex_. One of my favourite episodes.

It takes about twenty anxious minutes, but eventually Emma manages to get the emergency power going. It’s enough to get the lights back on and the screens working, but the whirr of the engine remains conspicuous by its absence.

“So do you think you can get it going?” Regina asks as a harrowed-looking Emma reappears from a service hatch in the floor of the console room. Emma shakes her head.

“Nope. Something’s locked the whole system down, we won’t be able to leave while it’s there.”

Regina sighs. “And I’m guessing that something is outside.” She’s suspected that that would be the case ever since they abruptly landed in wherever-they-are, and she remains a little apprehensive about it—stepping into the unknown is one thing, but at least in their adventures they _pick_ the unknown.

“Probably. You want to go up and get ready?”

 

* * *

 

Getting ready in this case means getting changed into something more practical, but it also means putting on the special belt Emma had gotten her a few months before. To the naked eye, it just looks an ordinary black belt—until she pushes a little button on the buckle, and then it doesn’t look like anything at all.

She’d briefly been baffled at why she would want a belt that could turn invisible, until Emma had next taken her to a shooting range, and Regina had discovered that the belt didn’t just turn _itself_ invisible, but also anything attached to it. Like a holster, for example.

“Is this really necessary?” she’d asked, as Emma had placed a small black pistol in her hand. She has no qualms with guns, of course, having grown up around plenty on the farm, but this seems a tad… extreme. She's guessing that this is not a glorified loudspeaker, as she'd taken to calling the 'gun' Emma had given her on Alpania. “Where exactly do you plan on taking us?”

“You never know what you might run into out there,” Emma had said. “You did _ask_ for a real gun, and—I want you to be safe, you know? Even if I’m not around.”

Regina had looked up at her, seen the frowning worry etched into Emma’s ever-expressive face, and softened immediately. “So what is this thing?”

“Fireball blaster,” Emma had explained. “It fires a little ball of superheated plasma instead of ammo. Hang on, I’ll show you how it works—”

Regina had simply raised the blaster to eye level and fired three perfectly aimed shots at the cardboard targets down-range. All three had immediately burst into flame.

“I think I understand the principle,” Regina had said, watching the fires with some satisfaction, “This will do nicely.”

Back in present, Regina picks up the blaster off her nightstand with a small smile. She’d rather not actually have to _use_ the thing, of course, but the idea that Emma had taken time out to make sure that she could protect herself even if alone—it’s a small thing, an obvious thing, but there’s a reason they’re together. She replaces the blaster into the holster, activates the belt’s cloaking device and heads back to the console room—where she sees that Emma and Henry are in the middle of a furious argument.

“For the last time, it’s a _no_ , Henry,” Emma says with her arms folded across her chest. She looks pained but firm against a red-faced and slightly tearful Henry.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Henry fires back and, oh, Regina knows _exactly_ where this is going. “You aren’t my _mom_.”

Emma recoils visibly and Regina—Regina feels strangely hollow. “Henry, don’t talk like that,” she says sharply from the top of the stairs, not willing to further examine how those words used on someone else makes her feel. Henry turns to her, his face red and his eyes watering.

“Mom, can you talk to her?”

“About what, sweetheart?” she asks, softer this time as she descends the stairs.

“He wants to come with us,” Emma says in a thick, controlled voice, her posture tightly wound. “I said no.”

“But of course you did,” Regina says, frowning slightly. “Henry, that is absolutely out of the question.”

Henry stares at her, outraged and openly betrayed, and Regina has to fight her own instincts so she can stand her ground. “But—”

“But nothing, Henry. It’s _far_ too dangerous.”

“But it always is!” Henry points out. “It’s _always_ dangerous for us, and you guys let me go anyway.”

Which is true, Regina realises with a guilty pang. “This is different, corazon. We have absolutely no idea what could be out there.”

“But—but what if you guys go, and the Bug turns back on and decides to send me somewhere else? You guys would be stuck here, and I would be somewhere else and I wouldn’t know how to get back to you.”

Regina pauses, hesitates—she hadn’t thought of that, and given the way Emma’s eyes have suddenly gone quite round, neither had she. “Is that possible, Emma? Could it do that?”

Emma shuts her mouth, opens it again. “I mean—yeah, maybe. It dragged us in and shut us down, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t do the opposite and send Henry to some random point in time and space.”

“But—but he’d be able to get back, wouldn’t he?” Regina asks apprehensively. “The Bug always seems to know where Henry wants to go.”

“He can navigate it, but he can’t fly it,” Emma points out. “And he wouldn’t know where to go because we have no idea where we are. And besides, would you really want Henry to fly back here?”

Regina tries to find another counterargument—but fails. “So you’re saying...”

“I’m not saying anything. He’s your kid, Regina. It’s up to you.”

“And I’m asking you,” Regina says gently. _I trust you_ , she doesn’t need to add. “What should we do?”

Emma swallows visibly, shuffles her weight on her feet. “I think we should let him come. We could—it’d be easier for us to protect him if he’s with us, and at least we won’t get separated.”

Henry’s eyes snaps up to Regina’s, wide and lit with sudden hope. He looks between them. “Really?”

Regina looks at him and her resolve crumbles. “You have to stay with Emma and I, okay? No running off on your own this time, and if either Emma or I tell you to do something, then you do it. Even if it means leaving us.”

He nods quickly, wrapping her in a tight hug, and for a moment Regina feels as if she hasn’t made such a terrible mistake after all. 

 

* * *

 

They open the door to a dusty-smelling corridor, the fairly bland-looking décor lit by faded yellow fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

“What is this place? A hotel?” Regina asks.

“Dunno,” Emma replies. “Let’s look around, see if we can find any switchboards or levers or anything like that. Don’t open any doors.”

That piece of advice is particularly sound, as there seems to be nothing along this corridor _but_ doors, wooden and unblemished other than the room number, and Regina is nowhere near stupid enough to be tempted into opening any. Even Henry looks at them with obvious apprehension, sticking close to his mother as they walk carefully down the long, winding corridor.

It’s all rather eerie, to be honest, uncomfortably silent in a way that gives Regina’s goosebumps—or maybe that’s just the chill.

“Doesn’t this place have heaters?” she asks, rubbing her arms. “I find it hard to imagine that the guests would find this acceptable.”

“Don’t think this is a place anyone would want to stay, Regina,” Emma says, searching left and right for something, _anything_ other than door after door after door—“There. What’s that?”

Regina looks in the direction that Emma’s pointing, and sees it too: a little green switch besides door number 999. “Is that…?”

“Let’s check.” She does so, getting out her little metallic sonic buzzer—as Regina had taken to calling it—and scanning the switch. “Aha! Yeah, this is it.”

“What is it?” Henry asks.

“It’s a gravity beacon, kid. A really big one. It’s like bait, it fooled the Bug into thinking it was a distress beacon. The Bug locked on, automatically landed us here and then some kind of signal shut all the systems down.”

Regina _thinks_ she understood that. Mostly. The bits that seemed important, anyway. “And you can shut the signal down?”

Emma flicks the switch, grins broadly. “Just did. Now let’s get back to the Bug and get out of here—oh.”

They all turn back towards the way they’d come—or, at least, the way they’d thought they’d come. Because about twenty feet behind them, the wide corridor which had stretched about a quarter-mile into the distance has been abruptly cut off by a very solid, very impenetrable-looking brick wall.

“What the hell?” Regina rounds on the wall, then—after ensuring that, yes, it is indeed a brick wall and therefore they won’t be getting through it any time soon—on Emma. “What did you _do_?”

“Nothing! I disabled the signal, that’s all. This definitely isn’t on me.”

Regina opens her mouth to argue—but no words come out, as she’s distracted by something over Emma’s shoulder. A very large, very foreboding something.

“Regina?” Emma frowns, noticing how Regina had become distracted. “What is—oh.”

Down the corridor, another twenty feet beyond them, another, completely identical brick wall had quite abruptly and silently appeared, blocking them in completely—save for the single door bearing the number 999.

“Emma?” Henry asks quietly. “What do we do now?”

 

* * *

 

After spending a good fifteen minutes confirming that yes, the brick walls are indeed brick walls and that short of Emma headbutting them, there's no chance of them getting through—Regina earns herself a solid glare with that remark, though Henry laughs—they soon are left with only one option, but also the one Regina feels a deep sense of foreboding over: the door.

Emma scans it, brow furrowed with concentration.

"Anything?" Regina asks quietly.

Emma shakes her head. "No life signs behind this door at all, so at least we won't run into any monsters—well, live ones at least."

"Encouraging."

"All we've got," Emma says with a shrug. She places a hand on the brass handle, gives a quick smile. "You guys ready?"

There's really nothing for it—Regina nods, tightens her hold on Henry's arm. "Let's do this."

Emma opens the door into a vast, pitch black room. They all head through cautiously, but nothing jumps out at them or drops down on them or rises up from the darkness to attack them, so things are going well. Regina is the last one through, her hands on Henry’s shoulder while Emma takes point a few feet ahead, handgun and buzzer raised and scanning their surroundings.

“It looks clear, but we should go slowly. Regina, don’t close the door—”

The door slams shut behind them. Emma spins back to stare at it—and Regina—in disbelief. “Regina, what the hell—”

“That _wasn’t_ me, Emma,” Regina grumbles, increasingly irritated with the tricks their surroundings are playing on them. Sure enough, when she tries the door it’s firmly locked, and even the buzzer—which has worked on everything from ordinary safety locks to quantum-locked thirty-fifth century bank vaults—fails, as the door is made from its nemesis: ordinary wood. “Any more bright ideas?”

Emma opens her mouth, presumably to argue, when a dazzling array of lights comes on above them, illuminating the entire room—well, not quite a room. More like a hall. A very, very big hall.

They can see now that they’re actually standing on a three-foot-wide bridge which traverses the length of the hall. It’s about a hundred yards long, the roof thirty yards above them and the floor—the actual floor—a very, _very_ long way below. So far below that Regina only takes one very brief look down before backing away from the edge as far as she dares, letting out an involuntary gasp.

“Oh great,” Emma says brightly, unperturbed at ever by the threat of imminent death mere feet away. She takes Henry’s hand and starts to cross. Regina does not. “I can see another door at the other end and it looks like it’s open, so I think we can cross—”

“Mom?” Henry interrupts suddenly, glancing back at a Regina who is still standing against the door with her arms folded tightly across her chest. “Are you coming?”

Regina looks up— _up_ —and gulps uncomfortably. “Aren’t there any other options?”

“Uh, no,” Emma says with a bemused frown, walking back to Regina. “Unless you want to abseil down to the floor and climb back up the other side or something. Regina, is everything okay?”

“She doesn’t like heights,” Henry tells her, his expression etched with worry. “I forgot to tell you about it.”

“But you were okay in Seoul. And New Prospect,” Emma points out.

“We had other things to worry about,” Regina fires back, glaring at her. “And at least in New Prospect there were _safety rails_.” Here there is absolutely nothing to stop any of them tumbling to a very untimely end if they stumble at the wrong moment—except Emma, Regina supposes, although how they’d help her out when the walls are this smooth and the drop so deep, she has no idea. And the bridge is _very_ narrow, so it wouldn't take much of a misstep for it to be her last. “So you’ll forgive me if I’m decidedly less comfortable with this—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Emma says softly, moving close to Regina and clasping her hand. Despite herself, Regina’s arms loosen, she lets the hand swing freely—or freer, at any rate—in Emma’s. “I’m sorry, I should have asked before. But this is our only way out, so… I’ll help you across, okay?”

Regina feels absurd and more than a little humiliated, but Emma is kind and free of judgement, and when Henry takes the other hand, the game is up. They cross slowly, Regina concentrating hard on placing one foot evenly and precisely in front of the other and her eyes fixed on the curls of Emma’s hair directly before her and not anywhere else, certainly not _down_.

“You’re doing great, mom,” Henry says encouragingly, but Regina’s legs still feel jelly-like and she’s absolutely certain that if it weren’t for him and Emma anchoring her with their hands, she’d surely trip over herself and the two of them would spend the next few hours fishing her broken body from the pit.

“We’re going to somewhere flat after this,” Regina declares shakily. “Maybe Iowa. Or Kansas.”

Emma laughs. “Sure, that’d be nice, visit the real Wizard of Oz. Come on, we’re almost there.”

A few minutes which feels like a few hours later, they finally, _finally_ reach the other side, and Regina all but collapses through the open doorway, emptying her lungs of breaths long held back. Emma rubs Regina’s back comfortingly, waits for her to stand up straight.

“You okay?” she asks quietly.

Regina nods, her heart rate back to normal at last. “Let’s never talk about this ever again.”

Emma gives her a small smile, presses a kiss to the corner of her lips. “I won’t, don’t worry,” she says, as Henry closes the door behind him.

“Okay, what next?”

 

* * *

 

What’s next is another piece of corridor blocked off on either side by brick walls, and another door. Another new door, anyway—the door they’d come through is still there and unlocked, but it leads back to the hall and bridge and Regina has absolutely no desire to go back that way, thank you very much. The new door is numbered 840, which at least is in the right direction. Regina has no idea what’s behind it, but she’s at least sure it’ll be less embarrassing.

This time, she decides that she’ll take point, and try to claw back some dignity. She looks up at Emma, gun in one hand and buzzer in the other.

“Ready, Emma?”

Emma nods, massaging a line down Henry’s arm, and Regina pushes the door open.

Almost immediately, Henry yells, and Regina jumps back in alarm, slamming the door shut again.

In the brief glimpse she’d gotten, she’d seen that this room is smaller, much smaller, and the floor is mercifully flat—or perhaps that’s not such a good thing, because it had just left more room for the hundreds upon hundreds of snakes slithering about. Henry whimpers, burrowing into Emma and using her body as a shield. Emma swallows, holding him tighter.

“I’m guessing he doesn’t like snakes?”

Regina shakes her head. “Do you think that—”

“It’s a coincidence? Hell no.” Emma locks her jaw, sets her mouth in a grim, determined line. “Still, we gotta get through.”

“There’s absolutely no way Henry will go through. He used to have nightmares about snakes for weeks.”

Emma looks at her, purses her lips, then kneels down, pushing Henry away so she can look into his very round, very frightened young eyes. “Hey.”

He makes a small, scared noise and tries to move towards Regina, but Emma’s hands on his shoulders steady him, hold him still.

“I know you’re scared,” she murmurs, her expression soft, soft and loving. “But we _have_ to get through this door, and we’ve faced other scary things before, right?”

Henry nods, slowly and jerkily. “But—”

“You hate snakes, I know. But sometimes… sometimes we have to face our fears, you know? And your mom and I will keep you safe, whatever happens, okay?”

Henry’s lip quivers, and he looks on the verge of tears, but he nods anyway. “Okay.”

Emma pulls him in for a quick hug and a backrub before standing straight again, her eyes still soft.

“So now what? All well and good to say that, but we need a plan.”

“Yeah. I have one,” Emma says, and without further ado kicks down the opposite door, the one they’d just come through.

“Emma!”

“I know what I’m doing, don’t worry,” Emma says, as she moves back into the previous room. Regina is worried that she’s just kicked the door into the pit—but the pit and the bridge are both gone, and it’s nothing but a completely empty, completely normal room.

“It changed. How did it change?”

“I dunno, but I guessed we passed its test, so it went back to normal,” Emma muses as she picks up one of the broken chunks of door and rips off a long, thin piece, then another. It’s an impressive show of strength—and quite a sexy one, Regina thinks to herself. Quietly. “Here, give me your gun.”

 _Now_ Regina gets it. She hands over the pistol and watches as Emma sets the firearm to its lowest setting and fires two shots, one at the thick end of each of the two pieces she’s ripped off. Both ignite at once. “Here.”

“You got this idea from watching that Indiana Jones film, didn’t you?” Regina asks as she takes one of the makeshift torches.

Emma pouts a little. “It’s a great movie! We should rewatch it some day.”

Regina just laughs, letting that surge of fondness wash over her. Danger and fear is a constant in their lives, especially right now, but somehow Emma just makes it all feel okay. “We should. Ready, Emma?”

“Ready.”

To Emma’s credit, the idea works quite well: they move slowly as a trio, a still-terrified Henry in the middle and Regina and Emma on opposite sides, waving wide, sweeping arcs with their torches as they cross the room. The snakes circle and hiss menacingly at them, and Regina is under no illusions as to what will happen if they drop their guard, but they remain vigilant and the snakes keep their distance.

They make it to the other side within about ten minutes, Henry rushing through the exit door first and the other two backing through it slowly, torches still lit and pointed at the hissing snakes as Regina slams the door shut with her free hand. Henry attaches himself to her immediately, whimpering softly, and she drops the torch to hold him and murmur softly in his ear, rocking him from side to side.

“It’s okay, Henry, it’s okay,” she whispers softly, as he holds on even tighter. “It’s over, you’ve made it now, my brave little prince.”

It’s not over, though, as the next room is numbered 764. It’s no surprise to any of them when its hidden fear—which they’ve all agreed is what this bizarre hotel is throwing at them—turns out to be Emma’s, but at least this one can’t hurt them. At least physically.

Psychologically, though, is a different question, particularly when they can’t find an exit door.

“Emma, I think we’ve made a mistake,” Regina calls out when her inspection of the walls reveals nothing. She’d thought there’d be some little crack somewhere, some hidden passageway to be discovered—but no, there’s nothing. “I can’t find anything—Emma?”

Emma is standing dead still in the middle of the room, staring at a little girl sitting cross-legged in front of her. The girl has wavy blonde hair and dirty, ragged clothes, and she’s staring up at the night sky through a window that had silently appeared.

“Emma?” Regina says again, quietly, moving up to Emma. “Is that—”

“Me when I was a kid? Yeah,” Emma says, her eyes sliding up to Regina, and for a moment she looks as lost, as lonely, and as young as the little girl crying softly in front of them. “I’d say that I was about Henry’s age, or maybe a bit older. Definitely still on Earth, maybe still in Maine—hey, maybe if things had been different, we could have been high school girlfriends,” Emma jokes with a weak laugh.

Regina smiles briefly, but only briefly. “Can she hear us?”

“No. She’s alone, remember?” Emma says softly, and Regina _hurts_ for her. For both of them. She reaches up, strokes Emma’s arm.

“It’s not like that any more,” Regina reminds her. “You have a family now.”

Emma turns away, her expression twisted a little with rarely-surfaced hurt and fear. “For now. But one day you guys’ll be gone and—”

“We’ll still care about you,” Regina interjects, cutting her off because that, _that_ is territory that they have _not_ entered into and Regina intends on keeping it that way. “No matter what happens, you’ll have us. You won’t be forgotten and lonely while either of us are alive.”

Emma looks at her, stares at her for a moment, her expression still twisted with long-buried hurt—but it breaks, it softens, and she smiles, bright and soft and gentle like the first coming of spring, and her eyes sparkle as Regina loses herself in her—

“Guys, look,” Henry calls out, and breaks them both out of their little moment. They turn to see him pointing at what had previously been a completely featureless piece of wall. “A door.”

Regina turns back, kisses Emma lightly on the lips. “You made it,” she murmurs, then takes her hand and leads them both through the door.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter depicts character deaths, and quite violent ones at that. Unlike the rest of the story it is a little bit graphic.
> 
> On the other hand, though, these character deaths are fake in-universe. None of the characters are physically harmed during this chapter.

All in all, it’s a deeply harrowing experience for the three of them. Whatever this place is, it seems to have a laser-like ability to hone in on their deepest fears and worries, and then exploit them as exquisitely painfully as it can. It puts all of them through the wringer as it tests their ability to forge ahead and get to the other side. Room 682 is very clearly Regina’s again, as it involves a false Henry who is dressed completely identically to the real Henry holding Regina’s hand.

“Oh, it’s you,” the false-Henry says upon sighting Regina, his lips curling into an ugly sneer. “Why are you even here? I don’t care about _you._ ”

“Mom,” the real Henry says beside her, as Regina tenses, her body shaking a little. She swallows down her fear and starts walking, ignoring the insults the fake Henry hurls at her as he bears down on the three of them, insinuating himself as best he can into Regina’s eyeline.

“You’re not my real mom,” he snarls at them, and Regina chokes back a sob. “My real mom wouldn’t have _lied_ like you did. Only _evil_ people do that.”

The real Henry’s hand tightens around hers, and she keeps walking, her eyes level and her expression rigidly passive until she reaches the exit door and collapses to the floor, her body heaving with tearful, rasping sobs. Henry crouches down in front of her, and she pulls him into a hug.

“I’m sorry, mom,” he murmurs into her ear, and she holds on even tighter, tells him how much she loves him over and over again.

Once Regina has recovered and is ready to go, Room 556 is next, and it actually takes them a while to work out what’s going on as the moment they step through the door, it vanishes, and they’re left in total, bewildering darkness.

“Emma?” Regina calls out, blundering around whilst effectively blind. She feels the cold, hard and wonderfully solid wall next to her, and sticks to it like it’s her life support. “Henry?”

“Mom?” Henry calls out quietly from _somewhere_ nearby, his voice trembling and high-pitched, and Regina immediately knows what’s going on here. “Are you there?”

It takes them over an hour—a very disconcerting hour—to find the exit door, especially since their attempts to use torches again—and other assorted efforts to pierce the omnipresent darkness—end in failure, as if the darkness is consciously  _insistent_ on not being broken. But once they all find each other, it’s a reasonably straightforward task to follow the wall around to the exit door, and they all breathe a sigh of relief once they’re out.

Room 424 is very obviously a hospital. In fact it seems like a fairly normal human hospital, and Regina is momentarily thankful that it isn’t anything worse—until she catches a glimpse of Emma’s very white face, the unnaturally thin press of her lips.

“Emma?” she asks quietly. “Are you—?”

“Don’t, okay?” Emma says sharply, not meeting Regina’s eye and _definitely_ not looking at the tray of used needles sitting next to her. “Let’s just get through this.”

Anyway, they do end up getting through that just fine, and while Regina feels plenty of referred stress from the way Emma’s back is uncomfortably straight and her hand painfully tense as it squeezes Regina’s, it _is_ just a hospital. As such, they’re soon in front of the next door, numbered 378.

“I think this is the last set,” Emma says, her voice still tightened with stress. “I didn’t see any rooms with numbers higher than a hundred earlier on.”

Regina is still watching Emma closely, silently concerned about the way Emma seems to be jumpy and on tenterhooks. She knows Emma well enough by now to know that this is when Emma is most likely to do something rash, but she decides not to say anything about it.

“Good.”

She knows exactly what’s waiting for her in the next room, of course, having been well-prepared for it by near constant nightmares and vague, vivid dreams she’s been having for the best part of a year now. She’s told Emma about them, but neither of them have any idea what they mean beyond the fact that Regina is still deeply, deeply scared of her Mother.

“Hello, dear,” Cora says sleekly as they enter the room, her dark eyes glittering as they alight on the three of them. Regina swallows, but she remembers her entanglement with the Syxoc on New Prospect, and she isn’t about to fall for the same trick twice. “I’ve missed you.”

She’s holding a small, golden-orange orb which glows brightly in the dim light of the room, just like in her dreams. She squeezes it, and Regina flinches—

But Emma shoots the orb and it vaporises with a deafening explosion, taking the vision of Cora with it and leaving them in peace.

“Well. I hope the other two are that easy,” Emma remarks, and Regina can’t help but laugh.

Henry’s final room is fairly predictable as well. In fact it’s almost a rerun of before, but this time it’s a younger and silently crying Henry, calling out for his mother and receiving no response. Regina knows it’s fake, it’s just a trick of the mind played by the hotel, but her heart shatters into a hundred pieces at the sight of it regardless.

“It’s okay, mom,” Henry says quietly as they walk past—unlike Emma’s room beforehand, the exit door had been visible from the moment they’d entered the room. Regina isn’t quite sure what that means. “I know I have you.”

She smiles down at him, and wonders if that alone makes this entire ordeal worthwhile.

 

* * *

 

Emma’s final room is numbered one hundred and one.

Regina is about to push the door open and enter when Emma’s hand reaches out in front of her, blocks her way.

“Regina, wait.”

Regina looks up, sees Emma watching her with bright, bright eyes and a small smile. “Emma?”

“I just want you to know that—whatever’s in this room—”

Regina smiles back. “Save it for afterwards, alright?”

Emma nods, and Regina slowly, carefully opens the door.

At first sight the room is dark and empty, and Regina is wondering if this is another night trick—maybe Emma is afraid of the dark too?—but then she sees the grimy metal surfaces of the Bug waiting for them in the dead centre of the room, illuminated from above by a circle of light.

“Yes!” Emma exclaims, punching the air with elation, and she’s about to stride forward and into the presumably-operational time machine when Regina pulls her back.

“Emma, wait.”

Emma glances at her, frowning with confusion, but the reasons for Regina’s caution soon become clear as the Bug’s front door opens, and _another_ Emma walks out, dressed in exactly the same clothes as before.

The original—real—Emma groans. “This again?”

Before Regina can answer, though, another Regina, and then another Henry emerge from the Bug. They’re joking and laughing, their faces lit by the happiness that they’d all come to expect as their norm.

“Mom, I don’t like this,” Henry—the real one, standing next to Regina—says quietly, and Regina tugs him in closer.

“Emma,” Regina calls out, “what’s going on—”

She doesn’t finish the question, though, because at that moment all three of Emma, Regina and Henry—the false ones—freeze, and a billowing cloud of black smoke rises in front of them to reveal a very live-looking Cora.

The false Emma’s eyes bulge. “I killed you,” she says breathlessly. “I blew you up.”

Cora laughs, high, trilling and terrible. “Oh, darling. Did you really think it would be that easy?” With that, she flicks her wrist out at the false Emma. She’s immediately and bodily hurled into a dark corner room and lies still, unconscious.

At the same instant, the false Regina and the false Henry are hoisted into the air, as if suspended from unseen strings.

_Like  in that dream._

Cora brushes back her cloak to reveal a glint of bright metal—and in a singular, awful moment of sleeping dreams meeting manufactured ones, the real Regina knows everything that’s about to happen.

And so does the real Emma.

“Regina! _Henry_!” She jerks forward as if pulled inexorably towards them by sheer will, but she’s stopped dead in her tracks by some sort of invisible wall. She beats on it with her fists, yelling out their names.

“Emma,” Regina calls out, but doesn’t detach herself from Henry or dare move towards what she can  _see_  is going to happen, can see it with her mind's eye. A sword instead of an orb, Regina instead of Emma, but she knows exactly how the hotel had constructed this charade playing out in front of them. “ _Emma_ , it’s not real.”

She tells her that too, repeats it like a mantra as she pulls Henry in tight, shields his face from the awful scene taking place as Cora unsheaths the sword, slowly steps towards Henry

 _It’s not real_ , she tells herself, over and over again, and closes her eyes. _It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real_.

For a moment, silence, pregnant and so thick that she wonders if the sword will be stopped by the air itself—then an awful, horrendous and _wet_ noise, the dull thud of a body hitting the floor and a terrible, unforgettable and heart-rending “ _No!_ ” from Emma.

She can’t help it—despite every instinct, every _rational_ thought in her head, Regina opens her eyes again, _sees it._

At least she can’t see his face. At least the hotel had given her _that_ particular mercy, sparing her the sight of her _son’s_ —her _false_ son’s—face as he lies unmoving and _dead_ on the ground, his limbs splayed out at odd angles—

“Regina,” Emma says suddenly between great wracking sobs, and Regina is filled by the sudden urge to rush over and hold her, tell her that _it’s not real_ —but then she realises that Emma isn’t talking to her. At least, not the real her. “Regina, please...”

“Emma,” the false Regina chokes out, meeting the _real_ Emma’s eyes, and the real Regina feels she might split in half at that moment. “Emma, help me...”

Cora strides silently up to the false Regina hanging in mid-air, strokes a line down her tear-streaked cheek. “I warned you, dear,” she croons, like any parent would, “love is weakness.”

And she runs the false Regina through with the sword.

Emma screams.

She screams so loud, so violently that the very _force_ of it seems to shatter the invisible forcefield separating her from the grisly scene in front of her, a blue shimmering signalling its collapse, and Emma runs forward. She runs forward without a care in the world, straight at Cora and her sword—

But Cora simply smiles and vanishes, just as Emma is about to grab her by the throat.

Instead, Emma collapses to her knees, catches the false—but still conscious—Regina in her arms before her body hits the floor.

The real Regina watches, transfixed, as her dying counterpart coughs weakly, a trail of blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth.

“You promised,” the false Regina whispers, her eyes clearly struggling to focus. “You promised you would protect us.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma sobs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

The light departs the false Regina’s eyes and her head rolls back limply. Emma lets out another blood-freezing scream and starts crying harder than ever into the false Regina’s bloody chest. The real Regina and the real Henry can only watch, holding onto each other for whatever comfort they can as Emma sobs into the fake— _fake_ —corpse, cries herself hoarse, cries herself dry.

They watch until Emma falls quiet at last, beholding the horrific scene in silence as Emma brushes lines down the vacant, lifeless cheeks of her lover.

“You can go in, you know,” she finally says dully after what feels like hours.

Regina blinks, torn out of her stupor by Emma’s voice. “What?”

“Both of you can go into the Bug. It’s real, and it should be working.” She looks up, and her eyes are utterly blank, utterly vacant, and it takes Regina’s breath away for all the wrong reasons. “We made it.”

Regina swallows. “Emma...”

Emma smiles, and her expression is as dead as the imaginary corpses around them. “It’s okay. I’ll join you in a bit.”

Regina nods and she leads Henry into the little yellow car, taking her utmost care to look anywhere but down.

 

* * *

 

Emma is right after all; the Bug _is_ working, as evidenced by the bright, warm lighting and the gentle whirr of the engine having returned to the console room. Regina and Henry wait in silence, seated on one of the long chairs, Henry resting his head on his mother’s shoulder and Regina rubbing his arm absent-mindedly, her eyes and thoughts distant.

They sit like that, waiting and waiting, and Regina is just wondering whether she should go out and _make_ Emma come in rather than letting her do whatever she is out there when Henry clears his throat.

“Corázon?” She’s called him her favourite pet name innumerable times in the past, of course, but never in a situation like this.

“Do you think that...” he starts, before swallowing the rest of the sentence, wetting his dry lips with his tongue. “Emma. Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“Oh, Henry.” She kisses his temple, that of her kind, sweet boy. “Emma’s seen more than you and I could imagine. She’ll make through it okay.”

He nods, but he’s still frowning. “She didn’t seem okay, though.”

 _No. No, she didn’t_. But Regina is about to say otherwise, to reassure and explain it away when the door opens silently and Emma herself walks in.

“Emma,” she breathes out with relief, stands and tries to smile at her—but Emma walks straight past without so much as an acknowledgement and immediately starts typing at a keyboards below one of the screens. “ _Emma._ ”

“It’s fine. I shut the place down,” she says, and her voice is still utterly devoid of life. “I think it’s an old abandoned military training site—make people face their fears to become better soldiers, that sort of thing. But the gravity beacon started sucking random ships in like us, so they had to abandon it, and it’s been floating empty through space ever since. There wasn’t much left, just some perception filters and forcefields, and it’s all gone now. All smoke and mirrors, you know?”

In theory that’s reassuring, to hear Emma’s implied understanding that _yes_ , she knows that nothing in that place was real, but Emma’s head remains bowed and her shoulders are slumped. “And… you’re okay now?”

Emma pulls the throttle lever with abnormal force, tries to fake a smile. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Regina can think of a million reasons why, but doesn’t voice any of them as Emma turns to Henry. “Can you come here for a second, kid?”

Henry dutifully comes over, concern still etched into his brow—but it vanishes, his entire expression loosens and his eyes glaze over as Emma brushes fingers across his temple.

“What the hell—” Regina rushes over, pushes him out of the way. He barely reacts. “What did you _do_?”

“I wiped his memory,” Emma says dully, still not looking up at Regina. “Not, like, a lot—just of that last bit. He doesn’t need to remember the details of that.”

In fact, Regina had already been planning to ask Emma if she could do that, if she could excise that profoundly traumatic experience from the mind of a ten year old boy who really ought not to have gone through that—“You should have _asked_ me, Emma. He’s _my_ son.”

Now Emma’s eyes _do_ snap up to Regina’s, and they are wide and wet and filling with the first signs of emotion Regina has seen since Emma had entered. Regina feels the diatribe that had been waiting on her tongue slip and wash away.

“Emma...”

Emma turns on her heel and flees.

 

* * *

 

They don’t see Emma again for the rest of the day.

That’s okay, in a sense, as Regina decides to spend it watching superhero movies with her son, telling him over and over again how much she loves him, how indescribably precious he is to her. And he reacts, burrowing into her hold, only half-concentrating on the TV. She can tell that he’s trying to process the events of the day, work out what had happened, what it all meant—

“Nothing, Henry,” she says to him, her voice low and imploring. “It means nothing. None of it was real.”

“But the fears were real,” Henry points out, sharp as ever. “You being scared of heights and me of snakes and Emma of being alone—that was all real.”

“And we got past them,” Regina reminds him. “We got past the snakes and the dark and the hospital. We made it through.”

He relaxes again, but only slightly. “I don’t remember the last room. I mean—I remember a bit of it, but not much.” He looks up at her, and his eyes are blissfully, mercifully young still. “I think that’s a good thing, though. Am I wrong?”

She can’t lie to him—not now, not about _this_. She kisses the crown of his head, lets him settle it in the crook of her neck.

“No, sweetheart,” she murmurs. “You aren’t wrong.”

 

* * *

 

Regina sleeps early that night—it had been a deeply, thoroughly exhausting day—but she fully expects that with a little time and a little distance between them and the ‘hotel’, they’ll all be back to normal, their strange little family laughing and cavorting joyfully through space. She sleeps quickly and easily, despite her twinge of worry at the still-absent Emma, and her dreams are vague washes of colour: blonde hair, a lifeless body, flaming tendrils of golden light—

Her eyes fly open, but she doesn’t move.

She can hear shuffling behind her, and she remains still, feigning sleep. There’s a brief, quiet pause, interrupted only by a small sniffle—then she hears the sound of Emma getting into the opposite side of the bed. Hears, not sees, because she’s still facing away from her. She wonders if she should roll over, let Emma know she’s awake and gather her into her arms as she _knows_ Emma needs so badly right now—but Emma is quicker.

Apparently still under the impression that Regina is asleep, Emma gently and with as little disturbance as possible slides her arms around Regina’s body and pulls herself in so her front is flush against Regina’s back. It takes all Regina’s willpower to not let her breath hitch, but she realises that Emma needs this right now—Emma needs to give this comfort, silent and private and apparently unwitnessed by anyone else.

Regina hears one more sniffle, a tiny sob—then Emma buries her face in Regina’s hair, starts murmuring words Regina had never quite believed she would hear.

“I love you,” she whispers, and for an eternal moment Regina’s heart stops. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Regina falls asleep again with those three words echoing through her head.

 

* * *

 

When Regina wakes, Emma is gone.

She thought this might happen—she had _feared_ this would happen, but she assumes this just means that Emma wants to get an early start on their destination. She therefore takes her time getting changed, showering and getting breakfast for Henry, before the two of them make their way chattily—less than usual, but still there—down to the console room.

They freeze at the top of the stairs.

Emma is standing at the central column, surrounded by suitcases.

“Emma?” Regina asks, and her stomach is clenching, something hot is rising up her throat, she feels something else breaking. “What is this?”

“Clothes,” Emma says. Her voice has more life in it than yesterday, but only a little bit. “Souvenirs. Oh, and other stuff that I thought might come in useful, devices and special tech and things. Nothing that’ll give away where you live, though.”

“You—” Regina chokes, can barely say the _words_. “You’re taking us home?”

A solitary tear rolls down Emma’s cheek.

“Yeah. I’m taking you home.”

 

* * *

 

Emma lands the Bug neatly on the kerb in front of the house, mere minutes after they’d originally left. Emma walks the them silently to the door, where Henry turns to look back at Emma, eyes glassy.

“So are you leaving us now?”

Emma gives him a weak, watery smile. “Just for now, kid. I’ll drop by from time to time, see how you’re doing. But you have a life to go back to, remember?”

His lip trembles, and he surges forward to wrap Emma in the tightest, fiercest hug he can. Emma squeezes her eyes shut as she hugs him back. “I’ll miss you,” he mumbles into her belly.

Emma lets out a half-laugh, half-sob. “Me too, kid. Call me if you need me, okay? I’ll see you around.”

He breaks off, nodding, then with a final smile departs into the house, leaving just Emma and Regina face-to-face on the front porch. Emma looks down, puts her hands in her pockets, and Regina clears her throat nervously.

“So...”

“So,” Regina echoes, “this is it, then? This isn't about me making you do the laundry?”

It's a weak joke, but Emma laughs anyway, tosses her hair back. "I mean, if you  _really_ want to stay on board, then..."

Regina laughs too, but it feels a little empty. "So this  _is_ it. You're really leaving us."

“Not permanently,” Emma mumbles at her own feet. “You heard what I said to Henry, I’ll definitely come back for, like, Christmas dinner and Thanksgiving and all that stuff. Plus, you have my number.”

“I do,” Regina agrees, then hesitates before her next words. “I am a little mad at you, you know. For this.”

Emma’s eyes snap up to hers, wide and hurt. “What? Why—”

“You promised,” Regina whispers, her voice shaking, and _damn it_ , the first tears are starting to flow. She wipes them angrily away. “You promised that you wouldn’t do this to us, that we would _try_ —”

Emma steps up and kisses her, hard and so, so desperate that Regina’s eyes close as she lets out a sob into Emma’s mouth, her hands tracing up to cradle Emma’s cheeks. Emma’s eyes are gentle but riven with agony when she breaks off, and Regina just wants to hold her and never let go.

But then again, that it is a bit of a flaw of hers.

“I did try,” Emma says softly. “I tried _so_ hard, and I loved it—love _you_  so much, but I also promised I would tell if you if anything changed my mind, and when I saw Henry dying, and then _you_ , I just—I _can’t_ , Regina. Not any more.”

“But that wasn’t real,” Regina points out, voice and feet unsteady. “None of that was real. The hotel took _my_ dream and made  _you_ believe it was real.” And  _god_ , Regina will probably never be able to forgive herself for that.

“But it could be. Tomorrow we could go somewhere and that could all become real or real enough and I—I won’t can’t let that happen, Regina. Not on my watch.”

“But nowhere is completely safe,” Regina points out. “I could walk across the street tomorrow and get hit by a bus, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about that.”

“I wouldn’t,” Emma concedes. “But that’s way less likely than you dying hurt by one of the trillion things that would probably kill you if you ran into it, and we’ve been running into those things basically every day for like a year now. One day your luck will run out, and then...”

“So stay with us,” Regina says desperately, seizing Emma’s hand and pulling her close. “You’re exposed to all those same dangers too—put that all behind you. Build a life with us.”

Emma swallows, but shakes her head, looks older than Regina has ever seen her before. “I—I _can’t,_ Regina. If I stay with you now, I—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave.”

“And that’s a bad thing? Emma, I would love _nothing_ more.”

Emma smiles, Regina’s heart breaks a little more. “I know. But that’s the problem, you’d probably spend your life with me and—and then what? I’m supposed to hang around while you and Henry age and I don’t, and somehow no one else around us notices that?”

“Screw everyone else. What do they matter?”

“They matter to _you_ , Regina. You’re Mayor of this town. I won’t have you throwing your life away on my account,” Emma says softly. “And besides, can you imagine how it would be for _me?_ Watching you slowly die and knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop it? Regina, I—I know that makes me a coward, but I think that would be even _worse_.”

The tears roll freely down Regina’s cheeks, she chokes back a sob. “So what now? You’re just going to let me fall for you and then—then just _run off_? You really _are_ a coward, then,” she says, vicious and heartbroken.

Emma just smiles that awful, broken smile of hers. “I am. But you’ll definitely see me again, I swear—and who knows, maybe we’ll go somewhere special in, like, a a few months. For Henry’s next birthday or something.”

“I think it’ll take far longer me to get over you then that.”

Emma leans up, pulls her in, hugs her desperately, rocks her from side to side. Regina can’t even help it—she bows her head, rests it on Emma’s shoulder, watches tears drip down onto the cold, hard concrete below.

“Then that’s what it’ll have to be. I’ll be there whenever you and Henry need me, Regina, I always will—but as your friend, and nothing more. Not while you and Henry are human and I’m not.”

Regina sobs, and it feels like a little piece of her has died and she’s breathing out the ashes. “You know that’ll never change.”

“Oh, you never know. Maybe you’ve got a chameleon arch hidden in your house somewhere and you don’t even know it,” Emma jokes, and Regina can’t help but laugh.

“A what?”

“I’ll explain one day,” Emma says, then presses a feather-light kiss to Emma’s cheek, blonde curls tickling Regina’s skin, tracing over them like tendrils of flame scorching permanent marks into her skin. “I’ll see you around, Regina.”

With that, she turns away and walks slowly down the path, her back straight and her head high. Regina watches her, crying silently, perfectly still as Emma puts one hand on the gate, pushes it open—

“I love you,” she blurts out, unthinking, uncaring. Emma turns back.

“I know,” she whispers, smiles, smiles, smiles. “That’s why I have to go.”

She walks through the gate, shutting it behind her, and the metal clang echoes in the silence of the Storybrooke night.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY.


	11. Chapter 11

Minutes later, Regina standing by the upstairs window of her office, looking down at the little yellow car sitting by the kerb on the street. She wonders if Emma is going to come inside. She wonders if she should let Emma come inside, to do what her son would so dearly love her to do—what _she_ would so dearly love to do—and forcibly keep her in their life, keep one foot in the door to that extraordinary, magical world Emma offers them.

It would be easy, Regina knows. All she has to do is go back downstairs and knock on that door and demand that Emma stays, that Emma takes them back. Regina just needs to do that one thing, and they would have—

 _They would have_ —

It doesn't matter now, though, because a whirring noise fills the air, and Regina watches as it the Bug fades into the evening dark.

Regina wipes her eyes, closes the curtains, and moves on with her life. 

 

* * *

 

"So where do you think she is now?"

Regina gives her son a quick sidelong glance, then looks back at the road. "Who, dear?"

"Emma."

She sighs gently, but not loudly enough for Henry to actually hear in the seat beside her.

It's been two weeks since Emma had dropped them off back home. By and large, it's been two completely normal weeks as well, very much along the same lines that their lives had run down before the unexpected intrusion of an alien and her time machine into their lives—though with one clear exception, because Henry is actively trying to talk to her again. Sometimes the talks are easy, casual, like everything is okay and they're still on the Bug, sometimes they aren't. Those times, he comes to talk to her in fits and starts, mostly little halted half-conversations about minor, meaningless side-issues which only later segue into what he _really_ wants to talk about, with a halting voice and only rarely making eye-contact—but he is talking to her again.

She's under no illusions to what's prompted the change, though, because most of the time he still talks about Emma, and the adventures of the previous year.

 _Hey, mom_ , he would begin out of nowhere, and Regina would always perk up immediately in expectation. _Remember how cool it was when we saw that planet full of butterfly people and got to fly around on their backs_ , he would continue, and Regina would always let out the same sigh that she'd let out just now.

She'd smile too, though. Not just because Henry is increasingly freely talking and smiling and being _her son_ again, but because yes, that had been very cool. As had been visiting the actual, real-world Hanging Gardens of Babylon in their hey-day, which were very much real and far more spectacular than she could have imagined; and so had been taking part in the Festival of the Nine Suns on Karalax where sheer accident—though Regina had looked at Emma with suspicion the whole time—had seen her briefly crowned Queen of as many star systems for a few hours; and so had been more than a dozen other astonishing, indescribable sights that Emma had shown to her and her son.

And  _god_ , how she misses them—misses  _Emma._ Misses that puppy-like demeanour, that little sunny little smile, that puzzled frown. Misses her energy and vibrancy and indomitable determination to make things _right_ , whatever the situation. Misses her golden curls of hair and the soft brush of her fingers and the way she'd whispered Regina's name in the dark. Misses her desperately, misses her endlessly.

But she's also realised in the last two weeks just how  _right_ Emma had been about everything, how much her logic had been totally incontrovertible in the cold light of day, and Regina is a fully grown adult. She's more than capable of moving on with her life, and it's not as if she'll never see Emma again—Emma had promised, after all, and Emma  _does_ keep her promises. Eventually.

So yes, she smiles at those memories, and she understands why Henry would cherish them fondly as well. But none of that changes the fact that Emma is gone, and with good reason.

"I don't know, sweetheart," she says eventually. "I don't think anyone does, not while she has the Bug."

“I miss her,” Henry says softly, and Regina _aches_. “Do you think she's okay?"

Regina bites her lip, looks straight forward at the unmoving traffic. "I hope so, dear.”

The traffic breaks up, and within a few seconds they're moving again.

 

* * *

 

It's actually one change to their usual routine that begins on that day, her picking him up from school as opposed to letting him take the bus home. It hadn't been something she had done before, but there are more important things in life than Mayoral duties and spending a little more time with her son is one of them.

Of course, there are sacrifices to be made the other way, and there had been a reason he had left him to his own devices with respect to getting to and from school beforehand. Within a week her work schedule becomes severely compressed, compacted into the times between seeing Henry off at eight o'clock and her picking him up from after-school care at five in the afternoon.

She doesn't regret it. She doesn't regret it at all before the way he brightly says _hey, mom_ when getting in the car; the way his slightly flushed face is still glowing with youthful energy, no longer dimmed by an hour sitting alone on a cramped, dirty bus with kids he frankly doesn't like; the way that he actually _talks to her_ —but it comes at a cost, and today is no exception.

She rubs her eyes with the base of her palms. "Spencer, are you seriously suggesting to me that—"

"I'm not suggesting anything, Madam Mayor," the man—a twenty-year member of the city's council—sneers. God, Regina hates him—but she knows how to work him, and more importantly she knows how to _beat_  him, which is exactly why she has this job in the first place. Even so, she always feels she needs a shower whenever she talks to him. "If you don't do something about these disappearances then—"

"Have you talked to the Chief? Last I checked, law enforcement was still the job of the police in this town."

Spencer smiles so humourlessly that Regina momentarily wonders if he's about to try to swallow her whole. Not that he'd succeed, of course. "And we both know that the Chief answers to you, Mills. Very, very closely answers, if I might add."

Regina isn't sure what rankles more, the naked disrespect in the form of _Mills_  or the crass insinuation, but she doesn't rise to the bait.

She leans back in her chair, adopts a neutral expression, crosses one leg over the other. "I have every confidence that the police are in control of this situation. Now, Councillor, if there's anything else..."

For a moment, there looks like there will be something else—but Spencer's face twists into a scowl, and he rises to his feet, leaning over and planting his palms on the desk.

"Get this under control, Mayor Mills," he growls, "because if you don't, then someone else will."

Regina doesn't so much as break eye contact. "Thank you, Councillor."

He bares his teeth in a horrible simulacrum of a smile one more time, then turns on his heel and leaves, not even bothering to close the door on the way out. Regina watches him every step of the way, then—once he's well and truly gone—exhales deeply, letting her head fall back on the chair and closing her eyes.

No, she doesn't regret running for office. She'd been on the pathway to becoming Mayor for something like half her life, and she knows she's doing good, important work in running this city of eight hundred thousand, particularly if it keeps slimeballs like Spencer out of high office. But it's draining, thankless work most of the time, with far too much to do in far too little time now that she's taking Henry to and from school, and it's so very easy now to just sit back and instead imagine for a few private moments that she's in that ridiculous yellow car floating between the stars, the nebulas and the galaxies, Emma's soft murmurs and rippling laugh in her ear, a gentle touch at her back and that bright, eager smile—

"Madam Mayor?"

Regina opens her eyes again, and sees one of her main assistants peering through the door, frowning.

"I'm sorry, Kathryn, I—I needed to take a moment to clear my mind of Spencer," she covers quickly. "What is it?"

"The people from the planning committee are ready for the meeting," Kathryn says, then hesitates. "But if you want to wait..."

Regina sighs, then composes herself and gets back to work. "No need. I'll be down in a moment." 

 

* * *

 

It's all worth it, though. All the extra work, the sacrifices, the stress—it's all worth it for that moment when her son clambers through the open car door and shares her his smile that afternoon.

"Hi, mom. Thanks for picking me up."

Regina can't help but smile back, because—yes, she knows that deep down he still must ve angry. He still must be mistrustful, and there are still many bridges that need to be mended before they get to where they need to be. Beyond all that, though, he's _trying_ , and so is she, and for the first time in a long time Regina can see the end of this long, winding and often-dark path they've been walking down.

But they aren't at the end, and the fact that he falls completely silent later, unresponsive and staring at the window for the first fifteen minutes of their drive home is a sign that all is not quite well yet—and then asks her a question.

"Mom, why did you adopt me?"

She gasps—audibly gasps, and dares to tear her eyes away from the road for a second to look at him. But he's staring determinedly out the window, concentrating on not making eye contact with her.

"What—what do you mean?"

"I mean, why did you adopt me? Why not some other baby?"

"It was—it didn't work like that, honey," she says slowly, carefully, working hard to keep her voice controlled and free of emotion. "You were the one the agency selected for me."

"How did they get me in the first place?"

He just wants answers, she knows. That's all he's wanted all along. She breathes in once, out once, and begins.

"When your birth—parents put you up for adoption—" she manages over a half-involuntary swallow, but Henry cuts across her before she can continue.

"You mean when they gave me up."

He doesn't sound angry. He doesn't sound that upset at all and yet—and yet—

Her hands tighten on the wheel, her knuckles whiten. "When they put you up for adoption, you were given to an agency. The agency then matches you with parents who want to adopt."

"Oh." He pauses, and lets a little more frustration—anger, even, the pain of confusion—come into his voice when he says, "But why would they give me up?"

"I don't know, Henry," she says, and Henry _must_  know she's being truthful with that, because from the moment Regina herself had laid eyes on Henry she could never even _imagine_ —

"Emma told me she'd given up a kid once."

"Emma was also someone who was frankly averse to any kind of stability in her life, had a very dangerous job, no family to help her and, as far as I can understand, was barely beyond a teenager by the standards of her species." _And I still love her anyway,_ she doesn't add. “She did what was best for her child.”

"Oh. Okay, yeah." He takes a moment to mull over her words, his next question. "So did you just walk up to them and they gave you to me?"

"They were the ones who matched you with me, yes."

"So you didn't even choose? They just... gave you to me?"

Regina blinks rapidly, taken aback—"No— _no_ , Henry. They looked at who I was, and what I was looking for and they felt that you were the best fit. But I always had the final say, and if I didn't feel that they—" She chokes up briefly, unsure how to complete the sentence. "It was my choice in the end. And I chose you."

"But you could have chosen someone else?" he asks, and now he looks at her. "Another baby?"

She can barely look back, can barely—"Yes. I could have. But I didn't." She swallows, can't stop her voice trembling. "Henry, please—please believe me, the moment, the _second_  I held you, I knew you were right for me. From—from then on, I thought of you as my son."

For a moment, Henry says nothing. There's no response but the muted roar of the car engine, the distant warbling of the low-volume radio as Henry leans his head back on the window and resumes his watch of the cars flashing past in the opposite direction—

"Thanks, mom," he murmurs.

 

* * *

 

All in all, she adjusts.

It's not perfect, and it certainly doesn't have the dazzle and brilliance of literally _all of time and space_ , but it's life, her life, and she lives it as best she can even with the gaping Emma-shaped hole she can feel every single day. She stabilises her work schedule, starts to get a handle—or at least sell to the general public that she has a handle—on the disappearances, and she's starting to repair her relationship with her son. Things could definitely be worse.

They could also be better, though, and she's well aware that she's only starting to repair the most important connection in her life. Henry might not be shouting and yelling and exuding open hostility every time he sees her as he once had, but the betrayal is still there. He's still confused and lost, caught between the fact that deep, deep down he still very much loves his mother, his _true_  mother, and his clear desire to know who his "real" parents—his biological parents—actually are.

It's no surprise, then, that she catches him on her computer late one evening, well after they've both gone to bed—in theory, anyway.

"Henry, what are you doing?" she asks as she turns on the light, trying her best to make her voice sound sharp above the drowsiness.

He jumps in his chair, having not heard her enter, and rapidly tries to close the laptop lid—but she's faster, and she firmly takes it from his hands.

"Why on earth are you up this late looking at—oh," she finishes quietly, as she opens the screen and sees the webpage Henry had been looking at. It doesn't take more than a single glance at the _Who's Your Momma_  header across the top for Regina to work out what this is. " _Henry_."

He looks down at his lap, cheeks flushed with shame. "It's nothing, it's—"

"This isn't nothing— _Henry_ ," she says again, trying not to let her voice become too thick. "This is—"

"I just want to know, okay?" he interjects, looking up at her with young, young eyes. "I want to know who they are and why they—why they—"

His voice cracks and his eyes water. Regina squats down to his level places the laptop on the desk, tentatively opens up her arms, and sighs when Henry falls into them, sniffling and trembling in her embrace.

"It's okay, it's okay," she murmurs gently, and she wishes desperately that it were true, wishes desperately that he could just be _hers_  again, happy and whole, wishes that—

_That—_

She closes her eyes, exhales. "If you'd like, we could find your re—your birth parents. Together."

He shudders a little in surprise, then stills. "Yeah?"

"If it makes you happy, we will." She parts from him, brushing too-long hair from his bright, surprised eyes. "No more secrets, corázon."

He stares at her for a second, two seconds, long enough that Regina is briefly terrified that he won't believe her, won't even accept _this_ —

"No more secrets," he echoes, and his face is lit with hope.

 

* * *

 

It's more difficult than it seems, promises aside.

She starts by going to the agency where she'd originally adopted Henry. She might as well not have bothered at all, however—it had been a closed adoption, meaning that the birth parents' records are sealed, and the agency is both too professional and too protective of its reputation to give any leeway, even for the Mayor.

That those were exactly the qualities that had attracted Regina to the agency in the first place isn't lost on her.

She has other methods, though. Having the police chief in one's pocket has its perks, and she uses them now. Nothing overt or untoward, of course; just a polite suggestion that a notoriously secretive and opaque company has its records looked at to ensure that everything is above board. Of course, this all comes with a quiet suggestion around the side that if this _doesn't_  happen, there might be an anonymously sourced but deeply embarrassing cover story appearing in next week's Storybrooke Mirror surrounding the Chief's personal indiscretions. Though nothing that could be traced back to Regina, of course.

Even then, though, she may as well not have bothered—Henry's birth parents hadn't so much as given Henry to the agency as left him with them and fled, leaving the agency with no choice but to try and find Henry a home as soon as possible. All they'd been left with were two names: Starla and Neal.

"Starla and Neal..."

"That's all the information we have, Madam Mayor," the staffer on the other end of the phone call says, and at least has the decency to sound apologetic about it.

"Are you sure?"

Regina hears the distinct sound of pages being flicked in the background. "I believe so. There doesn't seem to be anything... it says here that the father was in his thirties. Nothing about the mother—in fact, a note here says that Starla may not even have been her real name."

Regina sighs. _Of course it wasn't._

She at least gets information on the father the following day—by which she means she finds out that a Neal aged thirty-three had died in mysterious circumstances years ago, having left no relatives save for a young son—whom he didn't know.

"But did this son have a name?" Regina asks when the town archivist tells her all this, though there's already a knot of trepidation twisting in her stomach.

Once again, she hears the sound of flipping pages, which abruptly halts. "Let's see—yes, the man's son was named Henry, apparently. There's no information here on who the mother was, though I could have a look—"

"That won't be necessary," Regina interjects, quietly hiding the deflating sense of disappointment the news had brought.

In truth, it's not really that important either way—deep down, Regina knows that it's the mother who really matters here, it's the mother who Henry craves to know, it's the mother who truly threatens her relationship with her son—

But Regina can't think like that. She'd made a promise, after all.

She spends most of that afternoon distracted, thinking over in her mind how she'll break the news to her son that her father—a man Henry has never met, has never known even _existed_ —is dead. She briefly considers simply keeping the information to herself, sparing him the completely unnecessary pain and hurt—but she dismisses it quickly. _No more secrets_ , she's said, and she's done protecting herself at the expense of her son.

It's with a heavy heart and a deeply uncomfortable weight in the pit of her belly, then, that she pulls up to the school and waits for Henry.

And waits.

And waits.

Children stream steadily from the building, but amongst the myriad young faces she can't see the bright, curious eyes and slightly slanted smile belonging to her son.

At first she tells herself that he's just delayed by a few minutes—but a _few_  soon becomes fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five, and the stream of children leaving school soon becomes a trickle, only a few loiterers milling around the entrance left, and that awful clenching feeling in Regina's stomach only grows.

Twenty-five minutes turns into a full half hour since the school bells had rung—a full forty-five minutes after Regina had arrived—and she's had enough. She leaves her car and marches straight to Henry's classroom, just in time to walk straight into Henry's teacher.

"Oh—Madam Mayor, I'm sorry, I didn't see you," the teacher—whom Regina knows quite well—splutters, backing away and trying not to spill her books. Regina folds her arms across her chest and glares. "What can I do for you?"

Regina decides to get straight to the point. "Where is my son?"

A frown. "I—I don't understand."

Regina has to stop herself from reacting too strongly—she's known and liked Jasmine since high school. More to the point, she knows she's reliable.

But that _feeling_  in Regina's belly is only growing, gnawing at her from the inside—"I've been waiting outside for half an hour. Henry hasn't shown up. Where is he?"

Jasmine continues to look totally nonplussed. "I don't—you called in sick for him, didn't you?

Regina stares. And stares. And stares. And—

 _Oh_.

"No," she says quietly, but her voice—her whole _body_  is starting to shake. "No, I didn't."

 

* * *

 

She remembers very little of the next few hours.

It's all too much of a rush, too much of a blur to recall. She spends the whole afternoon calling his phone every ten minutes to no avail, rushing around and around with Jasmine to contact every single human being who possibly could have had contact with Henry: fellow schoolchildren; other teachers; the bus driver; even the school janitor.

Every single one knows him in one way or another. None of them have seen him today.

She even goes to the police chief to request—demand, really—his help, but she knows he'll be worse than useless, and true to form he shows up at her house a few hours later, shrugging helplessly and saying what she'd known he would say all along.

She remains silent, completely silent, back turned to both Jasmine and Chief Hunter while she stares motionless across the living room where hanging on the wall is a five year old photo of her and her son at the beach. She sits still and listens, silently shaking and shaking—

"I'm sorry, Madam Mayor," Chief Hunter concludes in that hatefully pitying voice everyone is using on her this evening. "But that's all we know—"

"Get out," she says quietly, dangerously. When they don't move, she adds, "Both of you. Leave."

They do so without another word, the door swinging shut with a heavy, echoing finality, leaving her alone.

Very, very alone.

Her hand tightens around the scotch glass she'd been drinking out of for the last hour—then suddenly, violently, without so much as conscious thought, she hurls it at the wall, only narrowly missing the picture as it shatters into a hundred glass shards, before burying her head in her hands, screwing her eyes shut against the tears

This is her fault, she knows. Her fault for lying to him for so long. Her fault for alienating him to the point that he'd run off and falling into the wrong hands, as she's sure has happened. Her fault for assuming that she could justify all her mistakes with the false promise that he would at least be _safe_  with her, in the way she'd justified leaving the Bug and Emma and all of time and space—

She opens her eyes, raises her head again.

 _Emma_.

She'd assumed it too dangerous to involve Emma when the disappearances had picked up, too risky to entangle their lives so explicitly when the feelings between them are still so _raw_ on her side—but Henry is gone, _missing_ like so many others, and nothing else matters now.

With trembling hands, she picks up her phone and scrolls through to a number she'd only added out of caution, one she never thought she'd actually use. She wonders if it'll even work, if it even makes sense to call a time machine which could be anywhere in space and countless millenia removed from her—but Emma had promised it would work, and she has no other options left.

It takes a few seconds longer than usual for the call to connect, during which Regina's insides almost seize up with panic—but the dial tones start, ringing once, twice, three times, before Emma picks up.

"Hello? Who is this?" she asks, with that mixture of habitual wariness and youthful curiosity that Regina has so, so missed. "How did you get this number?"

"We need you," Regina replies, the words tumbling out in a breath. "Now."

A pause, a silence, then—

"I'm coming."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This next bit is very _The Doctor's Wife_ -esque, particularly visually.
> 
> It also includes a depiction of torture, as warned in the tag, though I do not think it is not very graphic.

Emma keeps to her word.

Regina only has enough time to get a dustpan out and clean up the tiny glass slivers littering the floor and gaze with self-admonishing regret at the impact mark on the wall before she hears the characteristic whirring noise filtering through the front windows. Almost immediately afterwards, there's a light, tentative knock on the door.

"Hey. I got here as soon as I could," Emma says brightly—then she notices Regina's ashen expression, the way her fingers shake even as they curl tightly around the door. "What's wrong?"

She doesn't know how to say it—she can't even find the  _words_ —"Henry."

Emma's brow creases, her eyes sharpen. "Did he say—"

"No. _No._  He isn't—he's _missing_ ," she blurts out at last. "We need to go. We need to—we need to get in your ridiculous yellow car and find him or he'll—he'll—"

"Woah. Hey." Emma steps forward, places firm hands on Regina's arms, steadies her, waits for Regina to look up. When she does so, she sees that Emma's eyes are hard, steely, her lips pressed into a determined line.

"We'll find him," Emma says, and _oh,_  the force of it, the _will_ of it, almost makes Regina believe that Emma's words alone will be enough. "We'll find him together. Okay?"

Regina swallows, and nods.

"Okay."

 

* * *

 

They start by retracing Henry's steps from that morning. Emma pulls out a small remote-like contraption which she claims is a locator of some kind. She tries to explain how it works—something about trace amounts of temporal energy that Regina suspects that Emma doesn't even fully understand, but the upshot of it is clear enough.

"You need to get something of Henry's, so it knows exactly what to look for," Emma tells her as she hands the device over. "Because it's been half a day and the trail will have decayed by now—oh."

The device has already lit up, having illuminated a gleaming yellow arrow on the ground in front of Regina from the moment she'd touched it.

"Is this meant to happen?" Regina asks, eyeing the device with narrow-eyed suspicion.

"No," Emma says with a frown, but she moves towards the door anyway. "Come on, let's go."

They follow the arrow out into the street and down the path, and it quickly becomes clear that they're walking towards the bus stop Henry takes each morning. Not that Regina feels like she's any closer to getting the answers she needs, as she'd _asked_  the bus driver and he'd seen nothing.

But she trudges on anyway, following the trail, looking out for little clues, worrying, worrying, worrying—until the trail stops about fifty yards short of the bus stop, the bright yellow arrow on the ground flickering and dying away. Regina swears and bangs the tracker against the palm, swears again when it doesn't do anything and prepares to throw it against the brick wall they're standing next to

"Hey! Don't do that!" Emma intervenes, grabbing back the tracker from Regina and also banging it with her palm to no effect. Regina pinches her nose. "Stupid thing—"

"Any more bright ideas, Miss Swan?" Regina snaps, her already-elevated heart rate rising again. "I thought you were _good_  at finding people, not reliant on half-broken contraptions—"

"We'll find him, okay?" Emma cuts across. Her attention remains on the locator device, however, and she starts pacing around, agitated. "We've just lost the trail for a moment, but if you wait a few minutes—"

" _My son_  does not have a few minutes—"

"I _know_ , but if you could just chill for a bit then—"

Emma never finishes the sentence, however. One because Regina opens her own mouth to say something cutting and urgent and to the point, and second because Emma's pacing around and around makes her brush against the brick wall—

—and promptly vanish, disappearing into— _into_ —the wall like she'd been abruptly sucked into some invisible whirlpool.

Regina blinks.

"Emma?"

There's no response.

"Emma? Emma!"

She presses herself against the section of wall Emma had vanished into, caring little for the scene she's making, but she feels nothing but chipped bricks and mortar grooves.

"Emma— _no_ —"

She continues to run her hands over the wall so rapidly that she gets blisters, but she doesn't care—it doesn't _matter_ , because Henry is gone and Emma is gone, sucked through,  _swallowed_ by some portal that she can't even _see_ —

She stops.

 _A portal_. Like that, it becomes clear—she isn't quite sure _why_ she's so sure, but suddenly she knows, she's hit by the abrupt certainty that Emma, that _Henry_  are both through this hidden path to some distant world or alternate universe.

Carefully, she places a hand back on the wall, fingers pointing splayed upwards. She closes her eyes and pushes gently, gently against the solid brick, concentrating with some unnamed sixth sense on detecting any anomaly, any departure from the norm— _there_. She pushes against the spot, places pressure against the spot, just above head-height. At first nothing happens, the brick under her skin remains exactly that—but then it yields, giving away to something very, very different as her hand, her wrist, her entire forearm falls through.

She opens her eyes again and gasps.

It almost looks like a scene out of a movie, the way her arm is half-embedded into the brick. Hesitantly, she moves it around—it's like her entire arm from the elbow down is submerged in thick, viscous liquid, a jelly-like substance that is most definitely not a brick wall. She can _feel_  the suction pulling at her, the portal beckoning her through—though she can't see it yet. To her eyes, all she can see is a simple red brick wall illuminated by streetlights.

For a moment, she asks herself where this portal leads, how she'll get back, what's on the other side—but she stops, because the only answer that matters is the last one.

_Henry. Emma._

She takes one, deep breath, closes her eyes, and takes a step forward.

The portal accepts her at once. 

 

* * *

 

She tumbles through space and time.

It's wildly disorienting, flying through the void like this—though she's not exactly surrounded by nothingness, wherever she is.  Indeed, when she opens her eyes, it's almost dazzlingly bright.  Brilliant flashes of orange and blue fly past, passing in and out of her vision at impossible speeds.

Even so, amidst the high-speed swirls of colour she swears she can make out images, pictures, visions she instinctively recognises with some deep subconscious faculty able to interpret her impossible surroundings.

She sees a clearly younger Emma, huddled with her knees drawn up to her chest and defiant, angry eyes—Henry, wandering around, lost and confused in ways that hurt so keenly that Regina wants to somehow reach out and _touch_ —Mother, with her serene, mirthless smile that abruptly vanishes as she's yanked away by some invisible force—

Regina screws her eyes shut, her head spinning. She can't be in here with these _distractions_ , she needs to _get out_  and find Henry, find Emma—

"There you are, finally."

She opens her eyes.

The bizarre visions and swirling colours have gone, replaced instead by a dark, nearly blackish deep blue. The ground is hard, a mixture of small, hard stones and smooth, cold metal. She blinks, and lets firm hands pull her to her feet. It takes a few more seconds for her vision to adjust once she's upright as she reorients herself, but once she does—

" _Emma_ ," she breathes out, then wraps the Time Lady in a tight, trembling hug. "God, I thought I had lost you."

"Ha, well, you can't get rid of me that easily," Emma jokes, her hair tickling against Regina's cheek and—oh, Regina has  _missed this._ She disentangles herself, though, before matters get out of hand, inspects her surroundings.

"Where the hell are we?"

"I don't know," Emma says softly, her ponytail flicking back and forth as she takes in their new surroundings. "It looks like there's a scrapheap of some kind."

And it does—Regina can make out discarded sheets of rusted metal, various pipes sticking this way and that and all other kinds of odds and ends in the dull light that seems to diffuse around them from some unseen source. She wonders briefly what exactly all this _stuff_  around them was for—but only briefly. She has far more important things to worry about.

"Probably," she says, more brusquely than she'd intended now that her mind is fixed on what _really_ matters right now. "Now, can we find my son?"

It isn't as simple as that, though. There's a clear path between the junk that they follow, but Emma's usual tracking techniques and tools for tracking don't seem to work here, ostensibly because of 'weird radiation levels'. To her own surprise, Regina doesn't comment, mostly because she herself can  _feel_  this world really is... well, weird.

It's not anything she can neatly describe. It's a disconcerting feeling, a tingling deep within her bones, prickling at her subconscious as she moves between pieces of discarded junk, twisted scraps that were once machines, and little bulbs still emitting some unearthly glow. It grows when she steps nearer to one of the head-height piles that litter the landscape, growing into a vague sense of nausea, her head starting to spin. She blink and rubs her eyes, and she _swears_ she sees flashes of gold around her, a general aura particularly surrounding Emma. But the next moment, it's gone, and now she wants to sit down and take a breather—but Emma gets there first.

"Emma?" she asks when Emma abruptly stops and sits—collapses, really—against one of the piles, rubbing her forehead. Regina's voice is gentler than she'd expected given the urgency of their task when she says, "Are you okay?"

"Fine," she says shortly, and in a way which doesn't convince Regina at all. “It’s just—something about this place, it’s weird, it's like it's pulling something out of me. Almost like regenerating. But I’ll be okay.”

"Emma—"

"I'm fine," she says, stronger this time, and removes her hand covering her eyes. They're still clear and bright, despite the fact that she looks a little green in the dark. “Just give me a moment.”

Regina doesn’t _want_  to, she wants to find _her son_ —but Emma is clearly in a bad way, and she isn’t feeling great herself, so she sits down next to Emma.

"So..." she begins, and now that they're actually doing this, taking a moment for themselves amidst the madness for the first time since Regina had placed the call, Regina starts to feel intensely awkward. Time spent apart has apparently done nothing to dull the razor-sharp edge of her feelings for the Time Lady, apparently, and suppressing them now is a task and a half. "How have you been?"

A dry laugh. "Okay, I guess. I've been... coping. Went back to doing what I was doing before." She looks away, and Regina knows how much Emma isn't saying, how deeply Emma  _yearns_ for things she feels she can't have. "What about you?"

"I've managed," Regina says, steering clear of any of the _dangerous_ areas lying between them. "Work has been hellishly busy."

A more genuine laugh this time. "I can imagine. How’s Henry been?”

Regina looks down at her hands, nestled between her knees. “Fine. He missed you.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't come back to check up on him, but I kind of assumed that—”

“I know. I know,” Regina interrupts, but softly, reaches up to cover Emma's hand, pulls it over to rest on her knee. She breathes in, and out. “I promised Henry I’d find his birth mother.”

Emma doesn’t say anything. Instead, she leans her head back, closes her eyes. Regina can see beads of sweat pooling on Emma’s forehead, and she’s tempted, so tempted to take her pocket handkerchief and wipe them away—“Are you sure you’re okay? I can go on—”

“I’ll be okay. One minute.” Emma opens her eyes again, and to be fair she’s starting to get the colour back in her face. “So have you had any luck?”

“With...”

“Finding Henry’s birth parents.”

“Oh. No, I haven’t.” Regina licks her lips, wondering if she should share what she knows—“Henry’s birth father is dead, I think. Or missing.”

Emma raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Really. He vanished almost immediately after Henry was born—or maybe even before, because he wasn’t involved when Henry’s mo—birth mother gave him to the adoption agency.” Regina looks down at her hands, entwines their fingers together. “Part of me wants to meet her, you know.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I want to know why she would give him up. Why she—why _Henry_  couldn’t have been enough to her to keep him.”

Regina can feel Emma’s eyes on her now, and Emma’s voice is very, very gentle, almost feather-light when she says, “Maybe she felt she had no choice. Maybe she felt the best way to be a mother was to admit that she couldn’t be a mother at all.”

Regina looks back up, meets Emma’s eyes, sees them bright and soft, soft, soft. “You’re talking from experience.”

“I am. I told you, remember?”

“I still think you’re a fool. You would have made an excellent mother,” she murmurs.

Emma gives her a pained smile, watery eyes clouded by her illness and deep-seated hurt that their conversation had clearly dredged up. “Not like you,” Emma whispers, and then—“Once we’re done with this and we’ve gotten Henry back, I’ll help you find them. It'll be our next adventure.”

Regina swallows, smiles. “Is that a promise?”

“Yeah.”

For a second, they’re at peace. They just sit there, shoulder to shoulder, smiling, eyes glimmering in the strange glow of the strange world that, for the moment, is of no relevance to the two of them—

But then Emma looks away and unwinds her fingers, the moment gone.

“Anyway,” she says, pushing herself to still-unsteady feet, using Regina’s shoulder briefly to balance herself. “What else have you been doing? How’s the whole Mayor thing going?”

Regina shrugs as she follows, a gesture she'd only picked up recently—since coming back to Storybrooke, in fact. “Like I said, hellishly busy. More people have kept disappearing, and no one knows—” She stops. “Oh.”

Emma frowns. “Oh?”

“The portals. They must have fallen through.” She starts moving, newly filled with all the purpose and drive from just a few minutes ago. “Let’s go. They must all be here, and Henry must be with them—”

“Hello?” a voice—a thin, frail female voice—calls out over her from somewhere in the near distance. “Is someone there?”

They both freeze, and share a quick look. Regina considers making themselves scarce, not revealing themselves to the new voice, but Emma has other ideas.

“Hey! Can you hear us?” she calls out. Regina grabs her.

“Emma, what are you—”

“Hey, chill. He might be able to help,” Emma hisses, before calling out again. “Hello?”

A slight pause, before—“Please—please help me.”

Emma doesn’t even hesitate. She immediately clambers over the nearest smouldering pile of twisted metal—although Regina can see her suppressing a shudder as she does so—towards the source of the voice. Regina has little choice but to follow, even though the lump in her belly has moved up to her throat—there’s something, _something_ about all this which leaves her deeply ill at ease.

She doesn’t voice her thoughts though, and particularly not when she crosses over to the other side, to see Emma crouched down beside a small old lady on the ground with her leg trapped beneath a long, heavy bar of steel.

“How’d you get here?” Emma asks softly, instantly empathetic as ever.

“I—I don’t know, I think it was a portal,” the lady whimpers, clearly in pain.

Emma sighs. “Yeah. There seem to be a few of those around here. Hang on, we’ll help you up.” She looks imploringly at Regina—who can’t exactly resist, despite the red flags going off all over her subconscious. She ignores them and, with a push,  the two of them lift the steel bar off the old lady’s leg, then helping her to her feet, an arm each supported by their shoulders.

“Thank you,” the lady says, smiling thinly at them with bright eyes— _so bright_. Regina blinks. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Emma,” Emma says brightly. Regina remains silent, which draws a frown but no direct comment. “Are you alright?”

“Fine, dear, thank you. What are you two doing here?”

“We fell through a portal, like you,” Emma explains. “How did you get here?”

The old lady explains that she’d fallen through another portal several days ago from a planet called Xavier, a small, agricultural human colony on the frontiers of the “Commonwealth”, whatever that was. She tells them she’s a miller, and holds an animated conversation with the two of them about the ins and outs of grinding flour with thirty-fifth century technology, even as they continue their search.

It’s all well and good, but Regina’s anxiety is rising and she’s still seen no sign of her son.

“A son?” the lady asks. “You have a son?”

“Yes, his name’s Henry,” Regina says impatiently as she scours through discarded tubing with one of Emma’s scanners for any clues, without success. “ _Damn it_.”

“We’ll find him,” Emma says to her as she does the same, but even she’s starting to sound concerned. “Lady, have you seen him?”

“Oh, no, I’m afraid I haven’t,” the lady says apologetically. “But I’m sure you two will find him, especially Regina. You seem like a good mother.”

“She is. She definitely is,” Emma concurs, before she abruptly starts to fidget with one of the many devices at her waist. “Hang on, I might have found something—”

Regina opens her mouth to ask what the _something_  might be, but never gets the chance because Emma is already standing and pointing the device straight at the lady. Or, rather, pointing the gun straight at the lady.

“Emma?” Regina asks, but deep down, she already knows.

“I almost bought all that bullshit about being a miller’s daughter,” Emma says, a lopsided, quivering smile on her face, a strange mixture of triumph and fury, ignoring Regina completely. “Almost.”

The lady seems stunned, and it’s enough to give Regina pause. “What in god’s name are you—”

“Regina never told you her name,” Emma says simply, the gun trembling as she grips it with two hands. “You slipped up, lady. You've been following us the whole time, haven't you? That's why I've been feeling like this. What are you trying to do, steal my regenerations?”

A pause, a silence—then a small smile, matching with those unnaturally bright eyes to give off something sickening, malicious. “Clever girl. But no, I already have something far more valuable than mere regeneration energy.”

A chill descends over Regina, like she’s been slowly submerged in a pool full of ice. “My son...”

“Oh, don’t worry. Henry’s fine.” A second, two seconds, then that smile grows, darkens. “And soon, my dear grandson will be much more than fine. He will be _great._ ”

Regina stops. Stares.

And suddenly, she sees it through the disguise, sees past the perception filter to the glittering dark eyes, the serene smile curling upwards at the tips with pure, unmitigated malice. Sees  _her._

_Mother._

“ _You_ —”

Near-blind with tunnel-vision induced by scorching, white-hot rage, she charges forward, and doesn’t notice the glowing, golden orb ensconced securely in Cora's right hand. Emma does, though.

“Regina, _no—!”_

But too late, as a brilliant bolt of yellow light bursts from the device in the lady’s hand, striking Regina in the chest. She experiences a moment of excruciating, all-encompassing pain—then darkness. 

 

* * *

 

She wakes up to something soft and warm under her cheek, and an awful headache. She blinks her eyes open, letting them adjust to the soft light of the small, bare room she’s in, slowly focusing on the small figure of the old lady seated a few feet away— _no_.

Not the old lady.

“Mother?” she whispers gently.

“Hello, Regina,” Cora says softly with a smile that on anyone else would look welcoming. “How are you feeling?”

Regina sits up slowly, staring. “It’s... it’s you? Here?”

Cora nods. “It’s been a long time, my darling daughter.”

Regina keeps staring. She has about a thousand questions, but decides not to ask any of them. She's only barely woken up, but her heart is racing at a million beats a minute and sweat is starting to accumulate on her brow. “You—you were in disguise. You attacked me.”

“For your own safety, Regina,” Cora croons, scooting closer on her chair. “You and Emma were about to attack _me_.”

 _Emma_.

Regina swallows. “Where is Emma? Where is my son?”

“I told you, Regina, Henry’s fine,” Cora implores, stroking Regina’s hair. Regina remains very, very still. “He came through the portal about twelve hours ago, but the local radiation made him ill. I’ve been taking good care of him since.” She smiles, her lips curling upwards with warmth that doesn’t reach her dark, gleaming eyes. “He’s a lovely grandson.”

 _Grandson_. The word echoes through Regina’s mind, and she shivers. “And Emma?”

Cora looks away.

“Mother...”

“She’s fine, if you must ask. She’s secure.”

 _Secure?_ But that means—“Are you—you’re holding her prisoner? Were _you_ the one behind all those people trying to kill her?” Something dark, something cold and hard crystallises in Regina's stomach. "How long have you been after her—after  _Henry?_ "

“It’s for your protection, Regina. _Everything_  I’ve done here is for your protection, and your son’s.”

Regina lets out a snort, knowing full well who this _woman_ is and what her idea of  _protection_ represents—and suddenly, a year-long mystery clicks into place. "You've been planning this all along, haven't you? All those portals were you, all those  _disappearances_ in Storybrooke were people falling through portals meant for  _me_ , weren't they?"

"An unfortunate accident. I was only looking for  _you_ , but I couldn't control where the other end opened. I'm afraid your missing people are probably floating through deep space right now."

"A likely story."

"And why wouldn't you believe me? I'm your mother, dear, whilst your dear friend Emma is... well."

“I don’t need protection from _her_ ,” Regina replies, trying to interject extra strength into her voice over the trembling. “She’s—" _the love of my life_ , Regina doesn't say. There's no way she'll volunteer that information freely and put Emma in even _more_ danger. If she's even alive—"She's my friend.”

Cora sighs, long and deep. “Do you know what she is, Regina? A Time Lady?”

“Of course I do.”

“No, I’m not asking you if you know that’s what she calls herself. I’m asking if you know what she _is_. What her kind is.”

Regina swallows. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“The Time Lords are dangerous, darling,” Cora says, leaning forward so she can say the words softly, almost intimately. “They aren’t to be trusted.”

“And I’m supposed to trust _you?_ ” Regina asks with disbelief, dozens of long-suppressed defensive mechanisms and insecurities coming to the fore again at the sight of this woman, her _mother_ —"I thought _you_ were dead, after all _._ ”

“Oh no, dear. I learned my lesson a long time ago, when one of them forced me through a portal and to this world. Away from you,” she concludes, her mouth a thin, pained line. "But I survived."

“I don’t remember that.”

“Of course you don’t, your memory was wiped,” Cora explains, then pauses. “Although... I suspect that some of those memories might be coming back now, no?”

Regina stares at her, furrowing her brow—but then remembers flashes of light, glimpses of a circular gateway into a dark, gaping void beyond, Mother being sucked through as she cries out—

Regina nods.

“I thought you might.” Cora sits back, sighing. “Time Lords are masters of telepathy, they can manipulate your mind in ways so subtle you can’t even sense. It’s probably been happening to you, and you haven’t even noticed.”

Regina shakes her head emphatically. “Emma wouldn’t. She—you’re lying.”

“Am I? She hasn’t displayed any... unusual mental powers at all?”

Regina almost says no—but only almost, because at the last moment she remembers that final, horrible day with in the hotel and afterwards, the way Henry's eyes had gone blank as his memories had simply been whisked away.

She swallows. “Emma wouldn’t do that to me without my permission. I trust her.”

A raised eyebrow “You trust her.”

Regina nods. “With my life. With _Henry’s_ life.”

Cora looks at her for a few long seconds, expression neutral and eyes glittering, before standing up.

“Follow me, please.”

 

* * *

 

They walk down a narrow, darkened corridor, Regina following warily in her mother’s wake.

“What is this place?” Regina asks.

“A scrapheap,” Cora explains. “The Time Lords needed a place to dump their rubbish, so they created this bubble universe,  created portals to the normal universe—your universe—and used them to store old, ruined TARDISes.”

“TARDISes?”

“Their time machines,” Cora says softly, almost distantly, a strange, otherworldly glint in her eyes.  “ _Time And Relative Dimension In Space._ Truly extraordinary things, like a whole universe unto themselves. With just one, you had control of something far above any kingdom or empire could ever imagine—and they were dumping them like old cars,” she says with a derisive snort. “All that power, and they quite literally threw them away.”

Regina stays silent, watching, feeling her apprehension rise—and her fear. But she says nothing, lest she betrays them. She knows her mother, she knows that fear in her hands is a weapon second only to hope and love.

“They abandoned this place long ago,” Cora continues. “And since it was an entirely artificial universe, it’s begun to disintegrate... which I assume you’ve noticed.”

It clicks. “The portals.”

Cora smiles. “Exactly. The walls of this world are breaking down, leaving gaps that the skilled can work to their advantage. My manipulations of those can only go so far, but don’t worry. The TARDISes are still here, and with time and dedication they can repaired... as you can see.”

Regina _can_  see, and for a moment it takes her breath away. The passageway has opened right up into a circular room lined with metal panels, tubing, and tangled wire; and in the middle, a brilliantly bright column of pulsating, energetic golden light flanked by metal panels filled with blinking lights—very much, Regina realises, like Emma’s Bug.

And on the other side of the column...

“Henry?” Regina whispers, spotting at last the tall metal slab standing upright on the other side of the room—and the woman strapped to it. “Henry!”

She runs over, calling out her son’s name. Henry is lying on a small fabric bed, and he groans upon hearing her voice as she reaches his side, his eyelids fluttering open.

“Mom?” he asks groggily.

She smiles so hard down at him it aches, her eyes watering with relief even as her heart sings. “Hello, sweetheart.”

“‘M not feeling good,” he mumbles, curling his body up into a little ball like the confused young boy he still is. “Where am I?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Regina murmurs, smoothing messy, sweat-matted hair away from his eyes. “Just rest, corázon. We’ll be home soon.”

It’s meant to be reassuring, but instead he frowns, his eyes seeming to gain more focus. “Emma...”

She waits, but he doesn’t continue, continuing to stare with increasingly wide eyes at _something_  behind Regina’s shoulder— _oh_.

Regina hadn’t noticed at first due to the huge mass of wires, having only had eyes for her son, but she notices now. Emma is here, _here_ , strapped in a false standing position to an upright metal slab, cables and tubing falling from its sides and linking to a glass box on the wall containing a small, glowing orange orb. Emma’s eyes are closed and her head bowed, her blonde hair tumbling freely down in front of her face.

_No—_

She rushes over immediately, placing two palms on Emma’s cheeks, but the woman is unconscious— _alive_  but unconscious—and cold, so cold in ways she wasn't even on Alpania, and nothing she does seems to help. “Emma— _no_ —”

“You’re wasting your time, dear,” Cora croons behind her, utterly serene in the face of Regina’s rising distress. “She won’t be waking up.”

Regina turns slowly, her hands shaking.

“What did you do to her?”

“What I had to.” Cora sighs, long-suffering in the manner of a parent chiding a stubborn child, and Regina _hates_ her,  _despises her_ like she can't ever remember doing before. “I told you, Regina, this world is falling apart. Either we get out of here with Henry, or none of us get out.”

“And Emma?”

“A necessary sacrifice. There’s no other way to get this TARDIS working, I’m afraid. Luckily for us, regeneration energy is a wonderfully malleable and adaptable form of power.”

Regina shakes her head furiously. “No. There has to be another way other than to steal her _life_ from out of her.”

“Why, Regina?” Cora asks in a voice that betrays nothing but infuriatingly polite curiosity. “Why is Emma Swan so important to you?”

 _Because I still love her—_  “She’s helping me find Henry’s birth mother,” she says in a low, hard voice that catches in her throat. She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears threatening to leak out. “She promised, and—”

She stops talking immediately, horrified, hoping against all odds through the silence that Cora hadn't caught that last bit—but of course she had.

"And what, Regina?" Cora asks softly, in a voice so unlike her own. "You can tell me, I'm your mother."

Regina turns, locks her gaze with her mother's, summons every ounce of defiance she has.

"And I love her."

Cora gives her a dead neutral stare. “Do you, now? Very well.” With that, she moves swiftly over to the central column, manipulating buttons on the consoles.

Regina takes a single step forward, alarm mixed with trepidation in equal measure. “What are you doing?”

“Helping her keep her promise,” Cora says sleekly, not looking up. “There.”

Regina opens her mouth to inquire further—but at that moment, Emma groans behind her, and she spins back around.

“What...” Emma murmurs, as her eyes flicker open, and she starts to take in her surroundings. “Regina? Regina, what's going on? What—oh.” She gulps, goes very, very white, starts struggling against her restraints. "No—Regina. Regina, it's _her._ " 

Regina opens her mouth—but finds that she isn’t quite sure what to say, which gives enough of an opening for Cora to get in first.

“Miss Swan. You’re here to answer a few questions of mine for my daughter, nothing more,” Cora says reassuringly, with sickeningly convincing sincerity.

Emma stills, her eyes start snapping between Cora and Regina. “Wait, this—this is your mother?”

Regina swallows, and nods. Emma’s eyes widen, returning to focus on Cora.

“Listen, I—I don’t know what you want,” Emma says, her voice far higher and faster than usual, “but I swear that Regina and I are going to stop— _ah!_ ”

Emma’s body had gone completely rigid for a second, every muscle going visibly taut as her head snaps back against the hard metal slab—and at the same time, the whole room brightens as the intensity of the light column in the centre of the room grows. A thin golden mist rises from Emma's mouth and works its way into the golden orb situated next to her.

Then, as quickly as it had started, the force that had possessed her leaves and she slumps forward, breathing heavily.

“What—what the hell was that?” she asks, panting, glaring with shocked eyes at Cora.

“Something to keep you in line. Now, first question: do you have a son?”

Emma frowns at her. “Yeah.”

“Did you keep contact with that son after he was born?”

Emma looks at Regina, still frowning. “Regina, what the hell—”

She never finishes the sentence, though, as her body goes rigid again for several seconds as yet more regeneration energy is forcibly ripped out of her body, and the room brightens further.

Regina can barely watch. “Mother, _please_ —”

“It’s for your benefit, Regina,” Cora says smoothly, watching as Emma slumps back down again, groaning. “Besides, it’s no different to what she was going through before, having all that lovely regeneration energy sucked out of her. She’s just awake to experience it this time.”

“It’s _killing_ her!”

“Eventually it would. But by then this TARDIS should be operational. In fact, I’m surprised it isn’t already—which is bad news for Miss Swan, I’m afraid.”

“You,” Emma spits out, defiant as always, “can go to hell.”

“Oh, not yet, dear. Now, answer the question, please. Did you keep in contact with your son?”

Emma continues to glare, eyes smouldering even though they’re glazed over and barely focussed. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I gave him up to be adopted.”

“Where?”

“Earth.”

“And how old would your son be now? In Earth years please.”

Emma stares and stares, her eyes widening—then, suddenly, something clicks. “No... no, it can’t be...”

“The _question_ , Emma,” Cora reminds, though the slowly growing smile on her face engenders something dark, some horrible deep within Regina’s belly.

“You asshole,” Emma says slowly, starting to struggle against her restraints. “You piece of— _guh!_ ”

Regina can’t stand it any more. “Stop it. Stop it! I don't understand why you're doing this and I— _stop it!_ ” she yells, tears streaming down her face. When it stops, she moves back to Emma, wiping layers of sweat from Emma’s brow as the Time Lady takes great, gasping breaths.

“All she needs to do is answer the questions, Regina. Now, again. How old is your son?”

A tear trickles down Emma’s cheek, and another, and another. Regina wipes them away. “Ten,” she whispers, looking down at the floor. “He should be ten.”

Regina stops moving.

“Emma?”

Slowly, with enormous effort, Emma raises her head to meet Regina’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Emma says, broken and hurt and somehow, Regina knows that what she’s feeling has nothing to do with anything Cora’s doing to her. “I didn’t... I didn’t know.”

“Next question,” Cora calls out before Regina can so much as speak. “Was the boy’s father a human?”

Emma closes her eyes. “Yes.”

“What was his name?”

Emma’s eyes reopen, her cheeks glistening with tears, and meet Regina’s, imploring, pleading, filled with silent apology. “Regina... please...”

Cora flicks a switch again, and this time Emma doesn’t so much as go rigid, but jerk around weakly in her restraints, her eyes are rolling up in her head as her body _glows_ a golden hue. It soon fades, and not just the central column but an entire array of lights around her are lighting up as Cora’s makeshift TARDIS comes to life.

By the time the ordeal ends and Emma collapses back into her restraints, she’s barely conscious, and leans heavily against Regina’s hand as it brushes her icy-cold cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

“Last chance, Miss Swan,” Cora says, now not bothering to hide the delight in her voice. “What was the father’s name?”

Emma stares straight into Regina’s eyes, and Regina stares back.

“Neal,” Emma whispers. “Henry’s father’s name was Neal.”

With that, Regina is thrown violently to the ground, the TARDIS shuddering and shaking back and forth as if caught in an earth-splitting tremor, a hideous screeching cacophony filling the air as Cora’s TARDIS takes off.

Regina covers her ears as best as she can, screwing her eyes against the noise, cowering on the floor as the room, her entire _world_  shakes itself to its very foundations—

Then, as suddenly as the commotion had begun, it stops.

For a few seconds, silence, Regina remaining sprawled on the floor with her hands half-covering her ears—then, unmistakably, the dull thud of a body hitting the floor.

She opens her eyes and raises her head and sees Henry standing at the central console, Cora nowhere to be seen—then she sees Emma’s body, face-down, unmoving on the floor, blonde hair splayed out everywhere.

“Emma!”

Both Regina and Henry cry out at the same time, and they rush over at the same time too. They turn her over, shaking her with trembling hands but she’s still and cold, freezing cold as Regina’s shaking fingers search her pale neck for a— _there_.

 _Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump._ It’s weak, very weak, and it’s in groups of four instead of two like she’s used to—but unmistakably, through the icy skin, a pulse.

“She’s alive,” she says, and both she and Henry breathe out at last. “She’s alive.”

For a moment, that’s how they stay, Emma’s head resting in Regina’s lap as she absent-mindedly strokes messy hair away from the brow currently free of its usual worry and laugh lines. Just like she would for her son. Just like she always had.

Eventually, Henry clears his throat.

“So,” he says hesitantly, “she’s my mom?”

Regina’s hand stills, and she looks at him—but there’s no fear, no anger, no betrayal in his eyes.

Just the curiosity of her son.

“Yes, she is.”


	13. Chapter 13

Apparently Henry’s extraordinary time machine flying abilities extends to TARDISes other than Emma’s Bug, because it turns out that he’d landed it right in their backyard—on top of the replanted apple tree, no less. Regina isn’t angry though—she can’t be, after he’d shown the presence of mind to pilot the TARDIS away the moment it had gained power, before Cora could do any more damage.

And she’d done plenty of that regardless.

They lay Emma down on the bed in the Henry’s room. She’s still pale and cold to the touch, but less so, the movements of her chest up and down a little more visible with each passing minute. By silent assent, Henry stays with her while she heads back downstairs to the lounge room—she is, after all, his mother

His _real_ mother.

It’s fitting, in a way. It makes so much of the last year and a bit just fall into place so easily—the bizarre difficulties in finding any details about Henry’s birth parents; the affinity he had shown with Time Lord technology; the way he and Emma had just seemed to immediately _fit_.

Internally, Regina berates herself—god, how _stupid_ she’s been not to see it all along, notice that same brightness in their eyes and tentative quirk in their smile. How foolish she was to believe that Emma crashing into her backyard all those months ago was a mere _coincidence_ —

“Mom?”

She blinks, lifts her head from her hand, sees Henry standing in the doorway, frowning.

She swallows, composes a smile, assumes it doesn’t reach her eyes. “What is it, Henry?”

“I think she’s waking up.”

Regina nods. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

When she follow Henry upstairs a minute later, Emma is just stirring, her eyes slowly fluttering open and falling upon Regina—no. On Henry.

“Hi, kid,” she says slowly, slurred, before her focus turns to Regina. “What happened?”

“We escaped, thanks to Henry,” she says, trying to sound gentle rather than clipped and not quite succeeding. “We’re home now.”

“Oh. And your...” Emma coughs, winces a little in pain. “Your mother?”

“Disappeared, I’m afraid,” Regina says with a sigh. “I’ve already called the police to keep a lookout, but I wouldn’t expect much from them. She’ll be back.”

“Oh,” Emma says, then closes her eyes, flares her nostrils as she sinks into memory. “For what it’s worth... I'm sorry, you know. I—I had no idea.”

Regina knows. Of _course_ Regina knows. In theory, she’s aware that this could be all part of some con, some trick to worm her way into her son’s heart and then her own heart and use that to steal him away—but no. Deep down within her bones, at that level well below the subconscious that has never, ever stopped being totally besotted with the Time Lady, she knows that Emma has been nothing but sincere—if not, in hindsight, truthful—in all her dealings with Henry. And Regina _trusts her_ , that's the thing. Emma has fought harder than anyone to see Regina and Henry reconciled—including, in a way, Regina herself.

And yet.

And yet Emma is here, now, in Regina’s son’s bedroom—in _Emma’s_  son’s bedroom, her son’s. Her beautiful little boy that she’s always known is not fully hers, and now would never be fully hers because now he isn’t even completely _human_. And all the while, he holds her hand and she absent-mindedly rubs her thumb in little circles over the back of his palm—

Regina stands abruptly, smoothing out her pantsuit.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she says with an air of finality. “What’s done is done. Enjoy catching up with your son.” With that, she turns to leave.

“Mom?” Henry asks, turning around in his chair as she reaches the door. “Where are you going?”

 _Mom. Mom mom mom_ —

“To sleep, Henry,” she forces out, almost a whisper, not looking back, unable to look back. “I’m going to sleep.”

She shuts the door behind her—and then, just like that, all her energy vanishes, and she sinks to the floor. She curls against it, draws her arms up to her chest and finally, finally, lets the tears flow.

 

* * *

 

She wakes from a dreamless sleep the next morning in her own bed, a blanket having been put over her. She blinks her eyes open, squinting against the dazzling morning sun, and spots a glass of water on the table next to her. She smiles briefly for a moment—until she remembers last night, and realises who put the glass there and why.

She sighs, and heads downstairs. It’s the weekend, so in theory Henry should still be home, but she wouldn’t blame him if he’s—

 _Oh_.

He's home, perched on a stool next to the kitchen island with his legs freely swinging underneath—and on the other side, Emma is chatting animatedly, though she stops when Regina enters.

“Oh. Hi,” she says lightly, smiling nervously, but with all the warmth of months before. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Regina says, brushing straight past her as she makes a beeline to the coffee machine. “How about you?”

“A little better. A bit sore here and there, but nothing much.”

“That’s good.” She turns around, and sees that both Henry and Emma are watching her intently. She composes a smile for them.

“And you, Henry?”

“Emma was talking about this planet called Apple... Appla—”

“Apulapucia,” Emma corrects, smiling fondly. “It’s a really popular tourist hotspot which people say is amazing. I’ve never been, but...”

Regina stares at her. It’s been less than a day. Less than twelve hours, and already— _already_ —

But Henry’s legs keep swinging back and forth, and there’s that infectious, irresistible bright-eyed enthusiasm written all over his face, and Regina can’t say no to him. She _can’t_.

“I see,” she says, as neutrally as she can, and ducks her head away behind her hair. “Well, I hope you have fun.”

Henry’s legs still, and both he and Emma wear matching frowns. “But—you’re coming, right? You’re coming with us?”

Regina stops, loses her breath for a moment. “Oh, I—of course, I—yes, if you want me to.”

Henry slips off his stool and walks up to her, tapping her on the shoulder until she turns around. He’s still a good eighteen inches shorter than her, but it’s easy to forget as he looks up with her with such wisdom, such understanding, such _compassion_.

“I want you to,” he says simply. “Is that okay, Mom?”

She smiles, and smiles, and—she just doesn’t have the words. She falls into his arm, both arms windingly tightly around his back, a hand threading through his thick brown hair.

Her gaze falls upon Emma as she rocks her son back and forth, and Emma smiles at her.

 

* * *

 

It turns out that ‘amazing’ is an understatement when it comes to Apalapucia—which, surprisingly, Regina can actually pronounce. The basic premise of the planet seems to be that the locals wanted to replicate every single incredible sight in their pocket of the universe, but make it even bigger and better. Diligence and a good artistic sense had seen to the rest.

They end up spending two weeks there. One because there’s so much to see—they could easily spend months or even years here—and two because progress is decidedly slow, as it quickly becomes clear that ‘a bit sore’ had been a drastic understatement on Emma’s behalf. Although it’s one she maintains.

“Guys, really, I’m fine,” she protests weakly as both Henry and Regina catch her under the shoulder after she stumbles for the third time in a minute, lowering her to the floor of the museum of twelfth-millennium Syphian art they’re visiting. She’s chilled to the touch and pale again, cold sweat on her brow, and Henry catches Regina’s eye.

“Ma...”

It’s the name Henry’s been trying out over the last few days, and it makes Regina’s breath catch in her throat every time. “Miss Swan, the native species here is two-hearted as well, so I really think we should go and get medical—”

“I mean it, I’m okay,” she says fiercely, even waving off a few of the locals who were milling around in concern. “God, my leg’s killing me.”

Which is no surprise, as Regina has noticed Emma limping about for the last few days, and even commented on it. This is the first time Emma has actually complained, though.

“At least let’s move somewhere more comfortable.”

Emma lets out a sigh through her nose. “Fine.”

They find the cloakroom upstairs, and Regina uses a precisely calibrated mixture of flattery and intimidation to convince the staff to let her inside. It’s quiet here and there’s a bench with soft cushions on it—which is why Regina had chosen to move Emma here. That, and the fact that Emma is clearly in a bad way, and this was their only nearby option that wasn’t surrounded with tourists.

Even so, Emma’s condition is making Henry seriously agitated, nervously chewing on his fingernails—a habit Regina has never quite been able to remove from him—and hovering around them. It’s setting all of them on edge, so Regina hands over a cash stick and tells him to go buy ice-cream for the three of them.

“But—”

“I’ll take care of her. Go,” she says firmly. When he continues to frown that worried frown up at her, his mouth pressed into a thin, slanted line, she sighs. “You’ve heard your ma, she’ll be okay. Now go on.”

His eyes widen briefly, as if in surprise, then he departs, leaving the two of them alone. Regina turns back to see Emma with a small smile on her face.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Emma says. “It’s just—I think that’s the first time you’ve called me that.”

 _Oh_. “Well, don’t get used to it,” she snaps, and turns her back on Emma and the sigh she can hear.

“Look, Regina, I’m—”

“You’re sorry. I know.” She pinches her nose, but feels her irritation soften a little despite herself. “You’ve said that enough.”

She can hear Emma pushing herself up to sitting position behind her. “I mean it. I didn’t want to come between you guys, I wanted you to be happy.”

Regina knows that Emma does, knows it to her core, but—“But you do want to be his mother,” she says slow, low, resigned. “You want us to be happy, but you also want to be his mother.”

Emma shuts her mouth, ducks her head. “Yeah. If—if that’s okay with you, of course. If you guys will have me.”

And there, _there_  is why Regina hasn’t been able to say no yet. Seeing _that_  is the only reason she hasn’t zoned off what is rightfully hers—well, not the only reason. There is still the small fact that she still isn't  _over_ Emma, not by a long shot.

“I don’t think I get a say in the matter,” she says softly, taking a seat next to Emma. “He’s far more like you than he is like me.”

Emma frowns. “What do you mean?”

Regina swallows, feels her eyes water, can’t say it, _can’t say it_ —“I mean he’s like—like _you_. Maybe not fully like you, but close enough. I’ll have been dead for years, _decades_ even, and he’ll barely have started his life by the standards of your people. There’s just—so much, Emma, _so much_ that I won’t see. God, I should have listened to you when you were _warning_ me about this all those months ago.”

Emma is looking at her with such compassion that it _hurts_. “That’s natural, though. Children are always meant to outlive their parents.”

“Not like this. Our—my life doesn’t run the same as yours, as Henry’s.” She reaches up despite herself, brushes hair away from glimmering eyes and the mouth pressed into a thin, frowning line, so like her son’s. “I know it’s not your fault. I know you never wanted this, and I know how much you care about us. But this is my fate now, being with my son when I know that there’s so much, _so much_ of his life that I’ll never see—and that you will.”

Emma ducks her head. “Maybe not.”

Regina blinks, does a small double take. “Emma…?”

“Cora, she—she took my regenerations,” Emma mumbles in a sudden rush. “All of them except this one, and she almost took that too. That’s why my body—you know. It’s still adjusting.”

Regina’s mouth falls open a little, and her eyes widen. “But that means…”

Emma smiles at her, pained and sad. “Yeah. This life is it for me. Next time I die, I’m dead for good. No more do-overs, same as him.”

She looks young, so young, so _scared_ , and Regina just wants to gather into her arms and hold her like she needs, she _deserves_ —”But you’ve still got a full life ahead of you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“With Henry.”

Emma swallows visibly, understands, but the smile remains, sweet and sad. “Yeah. So... you're not mad at me for having—having all of that in front of me still, when you won’t?”

Regina furrows her brow, stares for a moment, considering—but there’s only one answer, after all they’ve been through. “No, of course not. I’m just… in mourning, I suppose, for the things I’ll never see that the two of you will share.”

Emma blinks. "I thought you'd resent me," she whispers.

Regina laughs, soft and low. "Resent you? No. Never. I still love you, don't you remember? As a friend, of course," she adds quickly, before Emma can panic.

It takes a second—but then Emma smiles, small and sweet and so, so, soft. Regina can’t help it—she takes the hand that had been brushing away Emma’s hair instead turns and gently, gently strokes a line down Emma’s cheek, smiles a little when she feels Emma leaning in—

“Uh, moms?”

She jerks back so fast it’s comical—but no, it’s only Henry staring at them with three alarmingly oversized cups of midnight-blue ice-cream and two very raised eyebrows.

Emma recovers first, of course. “What the—did you seriously buy out the whole ice-cream shop?”

“They had free upgrades,” he explains with a shrug. “So is everything okay now?”

“Good as new, kid,” she says, slapping him on the back and smiling encouragingly at him when he sits down next to her, passes her one of the cups “So what’s this?”

“Yoctoberry ice-cream. They told me to try it.”

Judging by Emma’s expression, Regina is fully expecting the worst—but to her surprise, it’s subtly sweet and, overall, not too bad. In fact, two spoons in, she decides she likes the stuff.

Emma does not. Well, her loss.

 

* * *

 

It’s the start of what’s best described as a subtle change in Regina’s relationship with Emma. Or maybe not really a change—more a reversion to what it had been beforehand, back in that magical time before Emma had dropped them off. Even then, though, things are different—they are still, of course, strictly just friends, but now they're also  _co-parents_ , to use the technical term. And that is exactly what they are:  _co_ -parents. Henry may be starting to trust Regina, really trust Regina again, but it's still not all the way there.

And in Emma's case, they've barely even started. Or rather, they've started again—it's like some grand cosmic force has hammered a great big red reset button on the relationship between Time Lady and now-revealed son, and now they're back to square one; Emma is eager to impress in her new and deeply unfamiliar role as  _mother_ and Henry not quite knowing how to react to that fact from someone he'd considered a friend, an equal. It's subtle, of course, and if Regina didn't know them both as intimately as she does, she wouldn't have seen it at all.

She honestly isn't even sure it's there half the time, playing out between the two of them in little awkward moments and sentences which don't quite complete the way they should and smiles which don't look entirely natural, and Regina is little but an observer in this unfolding play. However, as best as she can tell Emma is doing her best, Henry seems to be taking the news in her stride, and it isn't Regina's place to intrude further. Even if she is really, really tempted to do so.

Either way, she definitely notices that _something_ is different to how she’d expected it, as whatever transpires has had the effect of driving _both_ Henry and Emma closer to her. Maybe it is that the pair are finding comfort in Regina as their relationships with her finally stabilise—or, Regina wonders, maybe this really is just pity, mutual understanding that whatever Time Lady and half-Time Lord need to sort out, they have a virtual infinity of time to do so compared to their time with Regina, a brief aberration, a speck of dust intruding on their timelines—

And Regina decides to stop thinking about it after that, and just enjoy it instead.

In Henry's case, that means a singularly welcome return to what had once been the norm before she'd become Mayor, but Emma is different: the Time Lady is now more handsy than ever; more prone to bumping shoulders with Regina when they pick out a new destination; more likely to hold Regina steady when she stumbles in her woefully terrain-inappropriate high heels; more eager to lightly, lightly brush Regina’s hands with her own, a touch of skin on skin which leaves a burning trail that Regina struggles to ignore. All of it isn't _new_ , but the context is very, very different, and it serves as a reminder of that spark between them that had never gone out.

They do have one brief chat about  _why_ they had decided to ignore it, though.

"Are you okay?" Regina asks quietly as Emma pulls up some grass on one of the hidden worlds in the Eye of Orion. Emma looks up, frowning.

"Sure, what do you mean?"

"With us travelling with you again. I remember that..."

There's a brief flash of pain as the memory of the hotel passes through Emma's face—but it soon vanishes. "I mean, it's up to you. But Henry being like he is changes things, right? I thought that it was fair that we could at least  _try_ again, and not let dumb visions and nightmares get in the way. Without the kissing, of course," she adds quickly.

And friends without the kissing is exactly what Emma and Regina remain; they're reserved strictly for cheeks and foreheads, not lips, and there is definitely no sleeping around or late-night adventures or anything else of  _that_ nature between them other than occasionally flushed, heated looks in unguarded moments that quickly pass. Nothing except friendship, deep friendship between two women who share a son—and are very much trying to ignore the fact that they are both still deeply in love.

Not that Henry bothers with such convolutions, of course.

“ _Mom_ , this is getting ridiculous. Just kiss her,” he says with a Mills-patented roll of the eyes when she brings it up in passing, and she’s too taken aback to even chastise him.

She doesn't act on it, though, because everything—well, almost everything—Emma had said on her front porch on that exquisitely painful night still applies. And besides this is really not the time for Regina to be worrying about anything but Emma herself, because her condition is not improving.

“I don’t know why this is taking so long,” she grumbles one day between gritted teeth, shivering in layers of blankets that they had brought along just in case. They’re attracting a fair numbers of stares as a result, since they happen to be on a beach made entirely of silicon glass. “I really should be getting better now.”

“What’s wrong?” Henry says, fretful as ever when Emma is like this.

“I don’t know. Cora must have done something else—” She breaks off, coughing, and Regina can’t do anything but watch on helplessly. “Ugh. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Regina swallows, recalling _this life is it for me_. “If this gets more serious, then—”

“I swear to god, Regina, if you say _hospital_  one more time...”

Regina rolls her eyes, more out of fondness than genuine exasperation. “If you say so.”

 

* * *

 

 

And it’s okay, really. Emma is right that her condition, whilst disconcerting, is not _that_  bad, and simply means that they restrict their visits to safer, more relaxed places. They’ve got plenty to choose from, of course, since they have all of time and space at their feet; and besides, Regina actually prefers the change of pace, a nice break from the helter-skelter that’s characterised her work life of late.

“I thought you liked that job,” Emma says when Regina voices this a week later, frowning. Regina looks out over the sea, watches the horizon slowly brighten.

They’re back on Earth this time, at the White Cliffs of Dover, having just left the castle of the local lord who’d they conned into believing that they were the Queen and, well, Queen of Spain, together with Royal Prince Henry. Regina had tried to convince Emma to make him believe something _else_ , and had even given Emma an impromptu history lesson on what exactly the various Queens of Spain had done to her people, but alas it had stuck. At least the food had been good.

They’d decided to sneak out in the dead of night before anyone could notice that they were gone—or, more to the point, notice that they were not actually the Queens of Spain—but they’d stopped by the Cliffs, so they could catch the rising sun over the sea. Henry has gone to play down at the beach, but the two of them prefer to sit here, atop the cliffs.

Regina sighs, closes her eyes, and sits. “I don’t know. I don't—I enjoy the responsibility of helping people, but...”

“You don't know if it's what you're supposed to be.”

“Mother would disapprove,” Regina says, smiling a little, looking over at her. Emma is busy plucking flowers even as her brow furrows in thought, and Regina feels a surge of fondness she can’t control. “She was the one who made it very clear how important a political career was, to the exclusion of everything else.”

“Fuck her,” Emma says vehemently, and Regina has to laugh. “I mean—I’m biased, obviously, but there’s way more important stuff than power and status and all that stuff. Like, family and love.”

At that, Regina has to look away. For a few seconds, there’s silence between them, punctuated only by the distant sound of breaking waves and the low tearing of Emma plucking grass—

“Tell me,” Emma says softly. “What happened?”

“It was a long time ago,” Regina says quietly. “I was very young,  no more than sixteen, and I liked horse-riding. One day we had a new stable-hand at our farm—a year older than me, dashing, handsome.”

Emma has stopped picking flowers, and Regina knows her full attention is on her now.

“We were young fools who didn’t know better and I didn't even know I was gay yet but—god, that _feeling_ , Emma. We thought anything was possible for us, that we could just run off together into the sunset and be happy forever.” Regina pauses, reminisces for a moment—then sighs. “We were wrong, of course. Cora found us one afternoon, and within a week we were moving to Storybrooke.”

A sharp intake of breath from Emma. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

There’s a rustle as Emma’s moves clover—then Regina turns in mild shock as Emma takes her hand, presses something into it. A white field rose.

“I’m sorry.”

Emma’s said that so many times over the last few weeks, it might be tempting to believe that it’s starting to become insincere—but Regina only has to take one look to know that it’s not, it’s _not_.

“Thank you.” She hesitates for a second, unsure if she should do what instinct is screaming at her to do—but she gives in, lifts the rose to brush lightly against her lips, then threads it through Emma’s hair, just above her left ear.

There’s a moment’s peace, a moment’s silence, then Emma smiles, squeezes Regina’s hand again.

“Do you want to look for him? We could if you—”

“No.”

“No?”

Regina’s gaze lingers over Emma for a moment, her blonde hair with strands flying in the sea breeze—then looks away and down, down at a little boy chasing seagulls by the sea.

“I already have everything I need.”

 

* * *

 

On the way back to the Bug, about half an hour later, Emma asks a question.

“So why didn’t you try to find him? I mean, he was just in a different town, you could have called, or—or something?”

Regina looks across, stares at her, instinctively wants to chide her for asking a stupid question—until she thinks about it further. Yes, she could have found him. It would have been so quick, so straightforward to do so. Even if she didn’t even want to be with him, natural curiosity should have pushed her to at least _try_. All she would have to have done is looked up the name—

The name—

She stops abruptly in her tracks.

“Regina? What’s wrong?”

_Oh. Oh, no._

“I can’t remember his name.” she says, a slow sense of dawning horror creeping up on her. “Why can’t I remember his name?”

Emma stares—then swears under her breath, paling visibly.

“Cora wiped your memory.”

“It seems so.” And with that, nostalgia crystallises into an iron ball of fear—what _else_ has she forgotten? What else has Cora taken from her?

“But—but that doesn’t make sense,” Emma points out. “I mean, she can't be a Time Lady, otherwise you’d be one, and I'm pretty sure we've established that you’re not, unless she used a chameleon arch on you—”

“We’ve also established that she has Time Lord technology,” Regina counters. “And she's a master of deceit. But I have no idea _why_ she would want me to forget all about that...”

She trails off.

“Regina? Unless what?”

Regina isn’t paying attention to her. _Unless_... unless she was close to someone who would obviously have access to that sort of technology that it's Cora's interest for Regina to forget. Unless Regina had  _another_ presence in her life who could counter Cora's influence, and pull Regina away from the dark. Unless she was married to someone who spent all of Regina’s childhood telling her about the stars and planets, and the extraordinary people living on them, and promised her that she would see them one day.

“My father,” Regina says at last. “Somehow this has to do with my father.”

Emma stares at her in disbelief. “Are you seriously saying that you're actually a Time Lady in disguise?”

Regina doesn’t know. Regina has no idea what this all means, how this all ends, just—“I’m saying that we have to go to my old house, right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final stretch, coming right up.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last proper chapter coming right up.

They drop Henry off at home first. He begs and pleads and wheedles the whole time, and it’s almost enough for Regina to soften her heart and let him come along. This isn’t him being petulant, he seems to fully understand what’s at stake, how dangerous this could be if they run into Cora, and it’s almost too much for both of them.

But only almost.

“We’ll be back before you know it, okay?” Emma murmurs to him, crouched down to his eye-level. He bites his lip, and immediately launches into an all-encompassing hug, so fierce that Emma’s eyes squeeze shut against the tears threatening to leak out of them.

It takes half a minute for her to break off, wiping her eyes. “Go on,” she says. “Wish good luck to your mom.”

And then—and then he’s in front of Regina, her beautiful, clever, precious little boy, her entire world for the last ten years, and Regina—Regina doesn’t know what to say. Regina doesn’t know what to do except stand here and look at him and wish that she could spend the rest of time with him—

“I love you,” he says simply, and that’s enough.

She holds him like she never has, never will again, and never wants to let go. But when she does, she brushes a soft, feather-light kiss on his forehead, and says, “I love you too.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t actually go to the old farm immediately. Emma takes them way out to some far-flung corner of the universe first, and Regina briefly wonders why. Then Emma opens the door.

“Is this really necessary?” Regina asks, inspecting a long, futuristic-looking tachyon laser with eyebrow-raised scepticism. "I still do have my plasma pistol, you know. It's perfectly legal in Storybrooke."

“Last time we ran into her I got shot in the leg,” Emma says, holstering a bright blue pistol and hefting a preposterously large rifle into a harness at her back. “And I've lost all my spare regenerations to her or her henchies. So yeah, I’d say it’s necessary.”

“I’d prefer not to have to kill her, Emma. She’s my mother, after all.”

At that, Emma stops her inspection of her mini-arsenal, and steps over to squeeze Regina’s arm just above the elbow. “I know. But if worst comes to worst—”

“Then I’ll do it myself. You can trust me on that.”

Emma gives one last squeeze, then moves away to resume her work. “Okay. You, uh, remember how to shoot, right?”

Regina glares at her.

“Just checking.”

A few minutes later, they’re ready, locked and loaded for whatever Cora might throw at them—assuming she’s at the farm, which Emma queries. But deep down, Regina knows.

“This is all about Henry,” she says grimly. “About her _plans_  for him that were meant to me, and the power he could give her. The power _I_ was supposed to give her.”

“But then why involve me?” Emma asks, fiddling with the controls of the Bug. “Like, if you just want regenerations then you could grab just any old Time Lord, right?”

Regina had all but forgotten about them, but—“Yes, I’d say so.”

“So why? I mean, if all she wants is Time Lord energy then—”

“You’re the mother of my son,” Regina says simply. "And she surely has to know about  _us_. We didn't exactly hide our—our relationship last year."

Emma swallows, nods, and pulls the throttle lever.

The Bug lurches into life at once, wheezing and heaving its way through time and space. It’s a rockier trip than usual, and more than once Regina and Emma are forced to hold onto a railing as the time machine tips this way and that, groaning its discontent at being forced to go to this particular place at this particular time. But it lands safely regardless, with its usual dull, reverberating thud.

Regina runs a hand through her hair, lets out a breath, steels herself.

“Let’s go.” She picks up her plasma rifle and heads for the door, but—

“Regina, wait.”

She turns around, sees Emma shifting nervously from foot to foot, looking down at her hands. Regina heads back towards her.

“I, um, I just wanted to say that—if we don’t make it, I just want you to know that—that this time since I met you and Henry has been the best of my life, and I—I don’t know if that’s the way you feel or even if that’s how long it’s been for you, but I just wanted to thank you for—for everything and for raising our son and—and just—”

Regina kisses her.

Not hard at first, not deep, but soft, chaste. Emma makes a little—and incredibly cute—yelping noise in surprise at first, but soon relaxes and opens her mouth, letting Regina deepen the kiss with lips and tongue and _god_ , she should have gone back to this weeks ago, _months_  ago, she should _never_ have left this behind.

“Wow. Um. Okay,” Emma stammers against her lips, once Regina breaks off for air, hands on Emma’s cheeks. “That was—wow. ”

Regina kisses her again, and this time Emma is prepared for it, kisses back just as fervently. This time, Emma breaks off, and her grin is so broad Regina feels a laugh bubbling up inside her in response.

“Articulate as always, Miss Swan.”

“You can’t sass me while you’re kissing me,” Emma protests, making Regina immediately prove her wrong.

"I thought we had agreed to give this up," Emma whispers against her lips the next time Regina breaks off. "I thought we decided it was too dangerous."

"I know. I changed my mind, I'd rather have this and say screw the rest of the universe," Regina murmurs back, quickly takes another kiss. "I tried, though. I tried to stop being in love with you. It didn't work."

Emma lets out a soft laugh. “Same here— _god_ , how I missed you."

"Never again," Regina vows, winds her arms around Emma's neck as Emma does the same. "Whatever happens, we do it together, as a couple—as a  _family_ , and we deal with consequences  _together_."

Emma nods, smiles so broadly that the whole _universe_ feels a little brighter in that moment. "Together. But we have stuff to do now, so... is this a raincheck?” Emma asks, drawing patterns on the back of Regina’s neck. “‘You better live, or you’ll miss out’? That sort of thing?”

Regina kisses her one last time.

“It’s a promise.”

 

* * *

 

It’s nighttime when they leave the Bug and step onto Regina’s old farm. Regina takes a moment to breathe in the crisp, chill countryside air.

“It’s a nice place,” Emma comments, walking around. “I can see why you liked it.”

“I used to spend all day playing in the woods around here. I would get myself lost, and spend all day trying to find a way out,” Regina says distantly. “Father always found me, though.”

“Not your mom?”

“She always expected me to find my own way out.”

Emma lets out a low sigh. “Okay. What are we looking for?”

“My father’s grave. It should be here somewhere.”

“Do you remember seeing it before?”

She stops for a moment, doesn’t answer for a second—“No. Let’s keep moving.”

They walk through the half-grown cornfields onto the farm proper, where they can see a large, ornate manor in the distance.

“Nice place.”

“It was,” Regina says, as she pans her flashlight left and right, knowing that their destination is _somewhere_ close. The light finally falls upon a young, lone oak tree—and under it, a single white marble headstone.

She gasps, and rushes over, falling to her knees in the long green grass in front of the grave.

 _Henry Mills, beloved father_.

“You named Henry after your dad?” Emma says softly, walking up behind her and placing a comforting hand on her left shoulder, squeezing gently.

“It was the least I could do,” Regina says, sniffling and wiping her cheeks.

“He’d be proud of you.”

Regina snorts a wet laugh. “You’ve never even met him.”

“Yeah, but the way you raised Henry on your own with no one else to help, and with only Cora as an example? Anyone would be proud of you.”

Despite herself, Regina smiles, briefly closing her eyes and reaching up to grasp Emma’s hand on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

They remain like that, standing in silence for a moment, two women lost in contemplation. Regina studies the details of the headstone more carefully—it’s simple but beautifully, lovingly crafted, the gold lettering gleaming in the moonlight and the marble perfectly polished. The only blemish is a few dead leaves which had fallen from the branches above, and Regina goes to brush them off, her surface skimming the surface—

 _Like they had years before, when a sobbing, eighteen-year-old Regina had chosen the headstone_ —

 _Before digging the grave herself, in solitude, with nothing but grim determination driving her_ —

 _And watching as the coffin is lowered into the hole, impassive, betraying no emotion, her only movements being a twitching of her fingers as they trace over the outlines of a golden fobwatch in her pocket_ —

She blinks, gasps, backs away.

“Regina?” Emma asks, alarmed, as Regina gets to her feet. “What was it? Do you remember something?”

Regina stares at the headstone for a second, breathing heavily. The flashes of imagery had been nothing more than that, flashes, but between the tears and the calluses on her palms and the gritty feel of earth between her fingers and the glint of gold, she _knows_ —

“Get me a shovel.”

Emma looks at her like she’s been possessed. “What?”

“Get me a shovel. Now.”

The old stables are just twenty yards away, and they quickly find two shovels inside. Emma looks deeply sceptical about the whole thing, but when Regina pushes the blade of her shovel into the soil, Emma follows without complaint. For a few minutes, they’re silent as they dig, working in the night, turning over the topsoil assiduously as they search for what Regina _knows_ is down here—

“Regina? I think I found something.”

Regina drops her shovel immediately, hops over to Emma’s side. “Something?”

“I don’t know. It might be the coffin, but—” Emma pushes the shovel in with her foot, and it slides in further. She puts down the shovel and scans the hole she’d dug. “There’s definitely something down there.”

“Move.”

Emma does so at once, and Regina gets on all fours to start scooping out earth with her bare hands, searching and searching and searching— _there_. Something hard and small, embedded deep within the dirt, long and regular— _a chain_.

She reaches in, winds it around two fingers and pulls. At once, the chain and its parent object comes free, revealing a perfectly round, fantastically detailed golden fobwatch.

 _The_ fobwatch.

“Oh my god,” Emma breathes out, eyes widened like miniature saucers. “I know exactly what that is.”

"What?"

"It's created by something called a chameleon arch. It's a device that Time Lords use to hide or disguise themselves, it literally turns you into another species and puts all your Time Lord-iness—or Time Lady-ness, I guess, into the watch until you open it again," Emma explains, her eyes wide as they follow the watch swing left and right on its chain. "I didn't know you could use one without a TARDIS."

Regina swallows. "So you mean it's—"

“Time Lord technology?” a sleek, smooth voice completes. “Oh, yes.”

They both turn, and they see dark, malicious eyes watching them, coupled with a mirthless, joyless smile.

“Hello, dear,” Cora says softly, gazing at Regina. “You've found the watch, I see. Good. I had _all_ sorts of trouble finding you after you used it, Regina—until Miss Swan blundered into your backyard and gave you away to my agents.”

Regina reacts by wrenching the plasma pistol from Emma’s holster and firing three shots at Cora. The golden orb in her hand flares outwards, and the shots hit some invisible barrier with a deep, unnerving gong-like noise, three little glowing clouds of gas burning in mid-air before dissipating to nothingness, leaving a smiling and very much unharmed Cora behind. In her hand, the orb glows fiercely, having brightened with each shot.

“Now, Regina, is that really the way to greet your own mother?”

Before Regina can so much as think of an answer, Emma pushes Regina roughly behind her, placing herself between Regina and her mother.

“You want her? You’ll have to go through me,” Emma snarls.

“Emma...” Regina hisses, as Cora smiles.

"Be my guest, dear."

Emma holds her ground, picking up one of the much bigger rifles and raising it to aim at Cora—but never manages to get it up to eye level before dropping it, falling to her knees, clutching her chest, and crying out in pain.

“Emma? Emma!” Regina falls to her knees beside her, holding her body upright. Emma slumps against her, whimpering softly, and Regina glares—snarls, really—at her mother. “What the _hell—_ ”

“I'm taking what’s mine,” Cora says simply. “I was so close to finishing this before. Fortunately I can do so now.” Her thumb rests over a button on the top of the orb—and when she presses down, Emma cries out again.

“Stop! _Stop!_ ”

Cora doesn’t listen to her, and Regina can do nothing but hold on helplessly as Emma spasms and thrashes in her hold. When it stops at last, Emma’s head all but falls into the crook of Regina’s shoulder, her breathing shaky and unstable.

Regina presses kisses to the top of her head, holds on desperately. “Why are you doing this? What is the _point_?”

“The point?” Cora laughs, walking over so she’s all but standing over them. “Regina, there is no _point_. Only power, and need. Oh, and a healthy dose of tying up loose ends.”

The button presses again, and this time Emma is so far gone that she barely reacts, just stares blankly at Regina as her body jerks uncontrollably. Regina strokes hair away from her near-sightless eyes, kisses the tip of her nose, her twitching lips as they whisper something almost inaudible—

_Whispering—_

“Emma?  _Mi linda_?” she murmurs soft, soft as she strokes Emma’s pale, cold cheek. “What is it?”

Emma gurgles, a horrible rasping noise, and Regina shivers. Emma moves her lips again, slightly, almost imperceptibly, without sound, and Regina has to stare to make out the two syllables.

_O...pen..._

“Open what, Emma? Open what?”

Emma doesn’t move again.

“Emma? Emma!”

“She isn’t dead, dear,” Cora says, filling her voice with false sympathy. “At least, not yet. That happens in, oh, a minute or so.”

Regina can only stare at Emma’s unresponsive face, pepper kisses to every inch of it. Cora rolls her eyes and looks away.

 _Looks away_...

“Why? Just— _why?_ I _love_ her, why did you do this?” Regina sobs, even as her fingers start playing with the latch of the fobwatch still in her hand. 

_Open the watch._

“One day you’ll understand, Regina. When I’ve given you and Henry everything—you’ll understand that _love_ is  _weakness_.”

Regina screws up her eyes against the tears, kisses Emma’s lips once last time.

“No. I won’t.”

She opens the watch.

Golden beams of light immediately spill forth from her palm, its tendrils winding its way around her and surrounding her in a dome of dizzying, dancing, brilliant light, a beacon in the darkness. Cora jumps back, yelling in surprise, but Regina doesn’t care. She watches the golden dome rise and rise—and then descend, imploding in itself, rushing inwards and inwards and straight into Regina’s heart.

She throws her head back and screams.

It’s like nothing she’s ever felt, nothing she’s ever experienced, this impossible thing, this _force_ inside her, an entity of unimaginable power and presence consuming every single cell, filling from the inside out, rewriting her very essence—but then it softens, changes subtly, the sensations dimming, a pleasant warmth filling her as her past catches up to her present, a feeling of completion, like coming home.

She closes her eyes, and sees nothing but golden light.

When she opens them again, she’s no longer on the farm.

 

* * *

 

"Regina. Regina, wake up.”

Regina blinks her eyes open. “Daddy? What is it?”

“Something very important. Come, corázon, we must be quick.”

Regina follows dutifully behind her father as he heads into his bedroom, and pulls out two small objects from a small black box: a metal dube and a golden fobwatch. He places the watch in Regina’s hand, encloses her fist around it.

“What is it?”

“Your future. I have worked for many months on this, it should work even without a true chameleon arch. This will let you hide amongst the humans on this world and build a life with them. A good life.”

Regina frowns. “A chameleon arch?" She remembers vaguely what it does, it had been in one of mother's lessons. If Father had found a way to replicate it's effects without the arch, which needs a TARDIS, then—"But why? Father, I thought we were already hiding?” She pauses. “If this is about Daniel—”

“No, Regina.” He strokes a line down her face, brushes her hair away from her eyes. “It isn’t.”

“Then what—”

“I’m going to try and do something about your mother,” Henry says, low, glancing from side to side as if the ears have walls. “But if I don’t make it through, then you have to open this watch to hide from her. Promise me.”

“But—”

“Promise me, Regina. If anything happens to me, you will open this watch. Do not save me. Do not come for me. Just hide.”

Regina swallows, nods. “I promise.”

He hugs her, warm and fast. “Good. Now, it might not come to that but I don’t have much time—”

“No time, I’m afraid.”

They both spin around to see Cora at the door, smiling. Henry pushes Regina behind her, shielding her.

“It’s done, Cora,” Henry says. “I have stood by for too long, and I will not let you return to murder more of our people.”

Cora laughs, and pulls out a small, glowing orange sphere from her dress. “Too late, dear.”

She squeezes the sphere, and at once Henry collapses to the floor, jerking. Regina screams.

“Father!”

The jerking stops, and he stares at her sightlessly, mouthing three words.

_Throw the cube._

“Father, I don’t understand,” Regina says, shaking his shoulders, sobbing. “Father!”

But he’s already gone.

She sobs once, twice into her chest—but within her, rising, is white-hot, all-consuming rage. She lifts her head slowly, stares at her mother,  _hates_ her with every fibre of her being

“You... you killed him.”

“I took all of his regenerations, yes.”

She can’t believe—she can’t even comprehend—“ _Why?_ ”

Cora sighs, long-suffering mother to the last. “Once I finish repairing the TARDIS, we are going to rule the universe, Regina. You and I. We— _you_ are going to need more than a dozen regenerations for that.”

“I don’t care about ruling the universe, _mother._  I don’t—I just want a _family_.”

“And you will have one, Regina.” Cora walks over, lifts Regina’s chin with her hand. “Me. Remember, I am your mother, Regina and I know what’s best for you.”

Regina’s fists tighten around thin air—no. Not thin air.

“No,” Regina snarls, “You don’t.”

She takes the metal cube in her fist, and pushes it straight into Cora’s chest.

For a moment they both stare in shock at the metal object embedded above Cora’s heart. Cora even lets out a soft ‘oh’ sound. Then the cube activates, lighting up an incandescent blue—and a bubble, a circular portal, opens up around her.

Cora thrashes and moves, but she’s already being sucked through, the air rushing into the void beyond. Regina has to fight to stop herself from getting caught in its grasp.

“Regina. Regina, help me! Pull me out!”

Regina looks at her for one moment, her dear mother, and shakes her head.

“Goodbye, mother.”

With an almighty shove, she pushes Cora through the portal with two hands, then steps back as quickly as she can. Cora yells out, her face twisting into something grotesque, reaching out and trying to pull Regina through with her—but too late, as she falls through, and the portal collapses, leaving peace in its wake.

She falls to her knees, shaking her father’s shoulders, screaming her name—but nothing, no response, no answer, no life. When she checks his pulse and nothing comes back, it’s done, she knows he's gone. And maybe she could bring him back, maybe she  _should_ bring him back—but she has no idea how to do that, and she had made a promise.

_Do not save me. Do not come for me. Just hide._

Cora will be back, she knows. She’s through a portal, not dead, and that last, horrifying expression means that Father was right: Regina has to hide.

She kisses his forehead, whispers one last apology, and flicks open the latch on the fobwatch in her hand.

She closes her eyes as the golden light rises from her body and fills the room.

 

* * *

 

When she opens them again, she’s back on the farm.

She looks up, and nothing is the same. All her senses are sharper, brighter, the world painted in vibrant blues and purples even in the dark of night, sharp scents and sounds and the taste of the very air mingling to give her a story, a tale of this land, a history of this  _world_ more detailed than described in any book.

And, standing a few yards away, her mother.

“Welcome back, dear,” Cora says, her eyes glinting. “How does it feel?”

Regina stares at her, open-mouthed, disbelieving, feels that decades old rage filling her again.

“You piece of... you killed Father. You killed Daniel. You—”

“No, Regina. _You_  killed them. You killed Father when you hid. You killed Daniel when you were so _stupid_  as to fall in love with a _human_. And now you’re about to kill Emma too,” Cora snarls, no longer bothering to hide her disdain and fury. “I always told you, there are only two sides in this universe: the powerful and the powerless. And you keep choosing the wrong side.”

“And I’ll choose it again. And again. And again,” Regina spits back. “Anything to avoid becoming like _you_.”

Cora sighs, and raises the orange sphere again. “So be it.”

Regina closes her eyes, and waits. She’ll be with Father soon, and with Emma. She only hopes that she’s been good enough to save her son, to at least give him the life she so desperately wanted to leave him—

There’s an enormous explosion and a startled scream, and Regina opens her eyes again.

The orange sphere is gone, replaced instead by a rapidly expanding cloud of golden light.

“No!” Cora yells, as the light starts to dissipate and fade. “ _No!_ ”

Regina stares in disbelief—then looks down, as Emma’s arm falls back to the ground.

“A good shot,” Emma murmurs, and closes her eyes.

The golden light vanishes at last, and Cora screams. She rounds on them immediately, twisted and demented and ready for blood. “Foolish girls—foolish, foolish girls, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you _both!_ ”

She makes a beeline for Emma’s fallen rifle—but now, without the orb's protective energy shield, she’s vulnerable.

Regina doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t think. She picks up the pistol that had fallen from Emma’s grasp and, with the effortless precision born from her newly-restored Time Lady genes, fires a single shot into Cora’s chest.

Cora shudders to a halt, and looks down at the smouldering circle burned above her hearts.

“Oh,” she says, almost innocent in her surprise as her body starts to glow that familiar orange, the regeneration process beginning in earnest. For a moment, Regina hesitates, distracted by a wild, desperate hope that maybe in Regina's new life, her old body, Cora will be different, will truly be her  _mother—_ but no.

This ends now. For Daniel, for her father, for all the nameless victims of Mother's brutal war.

_For Emma._

“Regina...”

Regina's eyes are clear and her aim is true.

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

She fires again, and Cora falls.

 

* * *

Silence reigns. Cora’s body lies sprawled out on the ground a few yards from Regina. She stands motionless, arm still raised, breaths harsh and unsteady—then she remembers.

“Emma,” she murmurs, falling to her knees and trying to shake Emma awake. “Emma!”

Emma’s eyes flutter open, slowly and only with enormous effort. They half-focus on Regina, and her mouth crinkles into a small, fragile smile.

“Hi,” she whispers.

Regina does her best to smile, brush hair away from Emma’s mouth. “Hello, you.”

“Golden light... woke me up.”

“I opened the fobwatch. You must have absorbed some of that energy by accident.” She lets her smile broaden a little. “Thief.”

Emma chuckles almost inaudibly. “Guilty.” She coughs weakly—she’s only barely holding on, what she absorbed can’t have been anywhere near enough to keep her alive. “Cora...”

“Is gone. She can’t hurt us any more.”

“Good... s’good.” Another weak cough. “M’sorry.”

Regina bends down, kisses her forehead. “Don’t be. You saved my life.”

Emma closes her eyes, and her smile grows, strengthens, settles into something... something peaceful. “That’s good. Say hi to Henry for me.”

“Say it yourself,” Regina retorts.

Emma doesn’t answer.

“Emma?” Regina swallows, shakes Emma’s shoulders almost violently, but there’s nothing. “Emma!”

Regina stares at her, her pale, peaceful face so vacant of the life and laughter and vibrancy that has so filled Regina’s life for so much of the last few months, hoping and hoping and hoping—but Emma is gone.

But then, she'd thought that just a few minutes ago, thought Emma had gone when she'd opened the fobwatch and recovered all those parts of herself she'd hidden inside, all that  _energy_ —some of which had gone into Emma.

Suddenly, she has an idea. A stupid, dangerous idea—so a perfect one.

She closes her eyes, withdraws deep within herself to a part of her that didn’t even exist ten minutes ago, searching and pushing and centering herself until— _yes_. There, deep within her soul, down at the very core of her existence, a deep, fathomless wellspring of energy, of _life_.

 _Regeneration energy_. She knows it will work now, she’s just _seen_  it work. It’s the only reason she's still alive, the one trick that had allowed Emma to save her.

She opens her eyes again, and looks down at Emma, her co-parent, her lover, her _family_. She settles her cheeks on Emma’s palm, tilts Emma’s face until it’s mere inches from her.

“I know you’re in there,” Regina murmurs, low, intimate. “I know you can hear me.”

She takes in a breath—and on the exhale, a tiny wisp of glowing golden dust rises from her mouth.

 _Yes_.

“You’re probably going to be very annoyed at me for this,” Regina says, drawing circular patterns on Emma’s cheeks. She can feel that power, that life-force rising within her, steadily overtaking every muscle, every organ, every cell and every atom of her body—

“But it doesn’t matter now, because this isn’t really about you. It’s about me.”

Her fingers are starting to tingle, her vision is starting to blur a golden hue.

“Because this isn’t the first time I’ve been in this situation, like this, with the choice to save someone I love. And last time, I made the wrong choice. I didn’t even feel I had a choice—but I made the wrong one.”

She can feel it coming, can _see_  the golden mist, the force on the verge of consuming her whole. She can almost count the seconds before she loses control.

“So I ran. I ran and I ran and I ran, like you did. I ran from myself and I ran from the truth and in the end I even ran from my own son—until you came into my life.”

 _Any moment now_.

“You showed me the universe. You showed me so many amazing things—but above all, you showed me what mattered.”

Every inch of her feels like it’s on fire, ablaze with the untamed radiance of a thousand million suns, and she has to consciously force herself to even breathe.

“You showed me what my true family could be and—I want that, Emma. I want nothing else, except you. I want you, and I need you, and—”

She chokes on her words, closes her eyes as she tips over the edge and the regeneration reaches its climax her at last.

“—I love you, Emma. And I want to spend the rest of time with you.”

She lowers her mouth to Emma, kisses her, even as her lips burn, even as her skin is scorched by blinding, joyous yellow-gold tendrils of light leaping up into the still midnight air and then back down, down again, winding their way around and around the bodies of the two Time Ladies—

—until they all meet at last in Emma’s chest.

Emma gasps as she wakes, her eyes flying open and her back arching as she comes back to life. Regina opens her eyes again, lifts her head a little.

“Re—Regina?” Emma stutters between great, desperately-needed breaths. “Wh—what are you doing?”

Regina can only smile. Can only, only smile.

“Keeping my promise, idiot,” she murmurs, and kisses Emma again as a column of golden mist surrounds them both.

 

* * *

 

They bury Cora under the same oak tree, next to Henry Senior. They silently dig the grave six feet deep, having sourced some exceptionally high-quality marble from a planet made of nothing _but_ high-quality marble.

"It’s only fitting," Regina had said. "My mother wouldn’t settle for anything but the best."

Regina cleans the body—and the wounds _she_ had caused—herself, then covers it with a simple silk shawl and watches as Emma lowers it carefully into the hole they’d dug. Another half hour of shovel-work later, they’re standing over a freshly filled grave, the headstone gleaming in the dark next to its companion.

Emma takes Regina’s arm just under the elbow. “Do you want to say anything...?”

Regina has spent the last hour thinking about this. What does she say—what _can_  she say to the person who had murdered both her father and her first love, destroyed goodness knew how many lives beyond that, and come within seconds of doing the same to hers and her son’s?

What does she say to the person, _her own mother_ , that she herself had killed mid-regeneration?

She swallows and bows her head.

“Goodbye, Mother.”

Emma slides her arm around Regina’s waist and pulls her in to drop a kiss on her forehead, and doesn’t let go as they walk back in silence to the Bug.

 

* * *

 

Regina still hasn’t spoken as she watches Emma fiddling with a set of control knobs on the console of the Bug— _the thermal regulator_ , she remembers now. Mother had been very strict on making sure she learned how everything worked.

Eventually, Emma clears her throat.

“So... you’re actually a Time Lady?”

Regina gives a small smile. “Apparently.”

“I mean, you could have told me that _without_  giving away—what was it, two regenerations? Three?”

Regina scowls at her, outraged. “It was _at least_  six, thank you very much. I am not that stingy.”

“Wow, that does so not sound like the Regina Mills I know. You sure you didn’t get a head knock when you opened that watch?”

Regina cannot even _believe_ —“If you are seriously complaining about how I saved your life—”

Emma kisses her, and Regina is fairly sure she sees fireworks under her eyelids.

“I know,” Emma says, her eyes soft, soft and free of that devilish smirk that had just been there. “Thank you.”

And Regina is _so_  going to have to find a way to get back at Emma for this, but for now she’s mollified. “Yes, well. Shall we get back to our son?”

Emma brightens immediately—which is a feat, given her already bouncy-puppy-like state. “Sure. You want to fly?”

Regina’s hands are already on the controls. “With pleasure.”

Regina lands the Bug on the kerb in front of her house smoothly—much more smoothly than how Emma usually lands, she notes with no small amount of pleasure—and walks up to the front door. She pauses, though, before opening.

“Something wrong?” Emma asks, frowning quizzically at her. Regina shakes her head.

“No, nothing wrong, just—” She smiles at Emma, takes her hand. “We’re home.”

Emma smiles back, tightens her hand around Regina’s, palm to palm, before rapping the door with the heavy metal knocker.

It opens almost immediately.

“Mom? Ma!”

Regina opens her mouth to say _hello, sweetheart_ , but doesn’t even manage a single syllable before Henry wraps them both up in a simultaneous bear-hug, pressing them in so they’re both cheek-to-cheek against him.

“I was worried about you guys,” he chatters once they part. “I tried calling but I realised it wouldn’t work and no one was answer anyway and—”

“Well, we’re home now,” Regina says, cutting him off and placing her hand under his chin so she can look at his eyes properly, her son— _their_ son. “And we’re okay.”

“And your... your mom?”

“All taken care of, kid,” Emma says, smiling fondly down at him—but a little awkwardly, almost abashed, Regina notices. She makes a mental note to herself—for as much as Emma and Henry have already bonded, Regina has to remind herself that this is all very, very new for Emma.

But they can work it all out with time. And they have plenty of that.

For now, though, Emma claps Henry on the shoulder, ruffles his hair. “Your mom has something important to tell you, though.”

He frowns. “Oh. Is it about school? Because—”

Regina has to laugh. “No, honey. It’s not about school. It’s about me, actually.”

He relaxes, relieved. “Okay. Can we get pizza first? You can tell me then.”

Regina laughs again and she—well, she just doesn’t have the words. She pulls him back into a quick, warm hug, and looks up at Emma over his shoulder. She’s grinning but her eyes are distant, and Regina can already tell that she’s mentally running over the best pizza parlours in the universe to show their son.

“Yes, Henry. We can get pizza.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love the whole idea of the chameleon arch and fobwatch. I just had to use it.
> 
> Just an epilogue left.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading through to the end, I have enjoyed writing this so much. I adore these gay-dorks-in-love and their little family in every single iteration, and adding time travel and all of time and space has just made it even more fun. 
> 
> This is just an epilogue to tie off the story.

_So love, you should know what to look for  
and exactly where to go…_

_Take your time and don't worry about getting lost._  
_You'll find me._  
_Up there, a finger and two dots away._  
_If you're wondering if I'll still be able to hold you_  
_…I honestly don't know_

 

* * *

 

**epilogue.**

 

“So what do you think? Black or red?”

Henry leans forward, creasing his brow in thought, then shrugs. “I dunno why you’re even asking me, though. You _always_ wear black.”

“And I’m trying to branch out,” Regina explains. “Be the _new me_.”

Henry rolls his eyes. “Yeah, okay, mom.”

Regina gives him a glare, a half-hearted attempt to chide him for his insolence—she is a _Time Lady_ and Mayor of Storybrooke, after all, and she has to maintain his authority somehow. But he’s smiling, bouncing up and down on her bed as he watches her fret over the decision, and she can’t help but smile herself.

He’s happy again. It’s been so long, taken months and months of tears and pain, of threats to her life, of her family being turned upside-down, of her mother’s return and death at her own hand—but she wouldn’t trade any of it for the world, for the _universe_ , because her son is happy again in his own home. There are still kinks to iron out, still tricky moments to navigate, but he's happy.

And then there’s that other thing too. That _thing_ which explains why she’s taking so long and even enlisted her son’s help in merely picking a dress.

She bites her lip, trusts her gut. _Five minutes to seven—_ she’s going to be late if she doesn’t make a decision now. “I think I’ll go with the red. Do you like that, Henry?”

He nods and beams at her, standing and skipping forward to envelop her in a strong, tight hug. She loses herself in it for a few seconds, wraps her arms slowly around him and closes her eyes because even now, a full month after Cora had died, she still can’t _believe_ —

“I think it’s great,” he says, disentangling herself from her, then puts on a mock-serious expression. “Though make sure you’re home by midnight, young lady.”

She’s so bewildered that she forgets to berate him as he leaves the room, giggling as he closes the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

Twenty minutes of scowling at herself in a mirror later, she’s still undecided about her choice. It _is_ a striking colour, a deep, rich purple-red a few shades short of the colour of wine, but the straps are annoying, the fit around her waist isn’t quite right and it’s an inch or two too short for her tastes. She didn’t know why she’d even bought it; black really _is_ her colour, and back when she was, well, _human_ , she would have taken the pleated black number without a second thought.

But then again, that isn’t really appropriate for what she has planned tonight, and if she doesn’t take _this_ opportunity to branch out, she surely never will.

Either way, she’s still fiddling with it as she descends down the stairs to the entrance hall of the house—which, she immediately realises, is empty, despite it being fifteen minutes past seven, the time that Emma was supposed to show up.

She sighs. She’d half been expecting this, and Emma had _warned_ that this might happen. Indeed it’s happened a few times in the last few weeks, and Regina has already sworn to find the _real_ manual buried somewhere in the singular pigsty that is the console room of Emma’s Bug and actually _fix_ the damn thing so this stops happening.

If she shows up, of course.

An uneasy clenching feeling starts to tighten in her chest. She’s not _worried_ for Emma, not at all, but Cora’s agents, moles and mercenaries dotted throughout the universe remain dangerous even without direction, dangerous enough that Emma had forbidden Regina or Henry from tagging along— _everyone will know who you are now that you’re back, I can’t let you take that risk,_ she’d said, and Regina had had no choice but to agree.

As a result, Regina has spent most of the last week since they’d last seen Emma in a constant state of nervous tension, distracting herself and trying not to think about that third member of their otherworldly little family getting up to god only knew what. Mercifully there's no shortage of distractions; she's entering second half of her term, which means it's time to start fundraising for her re-election. That on its own would be time-consuming, but then some fool had pulled the wrong lever at a substation and plunged half the city into darkness for a few hours, and Regina had spent days screaming her head off at whichever underling she decided was responsible at the time. Most of her attention, though, isn't actually focussed on any of that, though: it's on her son, and the fact that something is bothering him again and that he isn't telling her about.

She'd sighed when he'd shrugged her off when she'd asked about it over dinner. "Sweetheart..."

"Mom, it's okay," he says, smiling gently—brittle and a little manufactured, but still loving enough for Regina to not want to inquire further. "I'm just worried about Emma."

And that's fair enough, to be honest. It’s not that they’re particularly worried that Emma won’t come back; six regenerations may only be half of a full set but it’s still plenty, and Regina can only wish that Cora had taken that lesson truly to heart even as she’d taught it to her daughter years and years ago.

It’s more that they don’t know _who_ will come back, whether it will be _their_ Emma, the blonde-haired dork that had crashed into Regina’s apple tree so many months ago now, or some stranger to the eye and the ear and a regeneration less than when she’d left.

But even in that case, they both understand that it will be _Emma_ who comes back, and so they’d carried on with their lives.

Still. Fifteen minutes has become twenty has become thirty, and even Henry has poked his head at the top of the stairs, his brow furrowed with worry.

“Mom, should we call—”

“No, no,” Regina quickly says, giving him a reassuring smile she doesn’t actually feel. “I’m sure she’s okay. Just late as usual.”

She wills him to accept his explanation, to not burden himself with worry over _this—_ and mercifully, he does, the tension running out of his knotted shoulders. “Okay. We really need to fix that Bug some time.”

“We really do.”

By forty minutes past seven, though, Regina is starting to pace around the entrance hall and run her fingers nervously through her hair. Now she really _is_ starting to consider giving Emma a call and has even gotten her cell phone out, despite Emma’s express instructions that _no, don’t do that, it’d just put you guys in danger—_

There’s a sharp knocking at the door, a rapid set of three.

The worry washes off her like a stream off a mountainside and she sighs with relief, concern now replaced by mild irritation. Twenty-five minutes isn’t the _most_ off Emma’s ever been—that award still goes to the time when she’d left them for a full _month_ _—_ but it’s still not great, and she fully intends to march up to that door, open it, and give Emma every piece of her mind about how ridiculous it is that she _still_ has not fixed that damn TARDIS—

But she doesn’t, because she opens the door and stops breathing instead.

“Hi,” Emma says slightly breathlessly, her eyes bulging as you she looks Regina’s body up and down. Regina keeps staring, her mouth hanging open. “I, um, I tried to be on time but I was kind of occupied and lost track—Regina, are you okay?”

Regina blinks, slowly wrenches herself out of her Emma-induced daze. She closes her mouth again, vaguely aware that she probably looks like a complete fool staring blankly at Emma like that. “You—you look amazing,” she says, very dumbly.

Emma looks down, inspecting herself. “Oh—yeah, I got this at the last minute,” says, lifting a handful of her midnight-blue dress. Even lit only through the doorway and shaded by Regina’s body, the material seems to shine—no, _glow_ —in the night, as does Emma’s usually-pale skin and her full, red lips which are pressed into an apprehensive frown as her fingers play with the end of her braided golden-blonde hair.

It’s pretty much the most beautiful that Regina has ever seen her, which is saying something. “I was on the middle of my last run to find Cora’s informants on New Earth when I spotted this at a second hand store. The guy claimed it was made of real sapphire nanotubes but I’m pretty sure they’re fake and it’s just fabric, but it looked nice so—”

Regina kisses her, kisses the blubbering and the breath and the surprised little squeak right out of her, kisses her until Emma’s arms have wound over her shoulders and around her neck. “I’m not being sarcastic, Emma,” she murmurs against Emma’s lips when they finally part. “You look gorgeous.”

Emma’s eyes widen, unable to hide her surprise. “Really?” she asks in a voice which is too small for someone this beautiful, this wonderful—but it soon slides away, and is replaced by a lazily confident smile. She kisses Regina quickly, a brief peck on the lips. “Well. You look pretty good yourself.”

Regina looks down at her dress, raises a sceptical eyebrow. “I’m still not convinced that red is my colour.”

“Pretty much anything is your colour,” Emma remarks. “Though this one looks especially good on you. Although,” she says, then leans forward to whisper right into Regina’s ear, her breath tickling in a way that makes the hair on the back of Regina’s neck stand on end. “It does make me kinda wonder what you would look like _without it._ ”

She pulls back after that, smirking at Regina with a single eyebrow raised in a way that, together with her words, makes Regina go slightly weak at the knees. To be honest, she’s—furious, _furious_ that Emma can get one over her so easily just like so. _She’s_ supposed to be the seductively sexy one in the relationship, making _Emma’s_ mouth go as dry as hers is right now just by the _sight_ of Regina, not the other way around.

She can’t do a damn thing about it now, though. Not any more.

“But later,” she manages eventually, her voice embarrassingly thick.

“But later,” Emma echoes, and her expression cools to something less… compromising. She steps back, offers Regina a hand. “Ready to go?”

Regina takes it without hesitation.

 

* * *

 

Unsurprisingly, everything goes to hell after about an hour.

It isn’t Emma’s fault. She’d chosen perfectly— _perfectly_ —for the location of their first date since getting back together. It’s a lake high in the equatorial mountains of St. Mortain, and for once they actually land right on time. Regina had been understandably sceptical that they would, but Emma had insisted on flying this time and Regina figures that since technically Emma is the one taking _her_ out for the date, it’s only fair that she takes the wheel tonight—or the throttle, as the case may be.

More than that, though, she senses that it’s important to Emma that she take the lead at this still-early stage of this relationship, that she makes the moves. And that’s okay; Regina is content for now to follow and to go wherever Emma takes her, secure in the knowledge that they have literally all the time in the _universe_ to figure things out. Whatever that may mean.

Anyway. They land on their destination—a rough approximation to a paddle-steamer—about ten minutes before the sun is due to dip below the high, snow-crowned peaks on the eastern side of the lake, and Regina is immediately entranced.

Indeed, she doesn’t even notice Emma silently going off to arrange dinner, as she’s too captivated by the vivid streaks of red and blue, purple and orange, green and pink, vibrant and dazzling, as the star ever-so-slowly descends beneath the sharp outlines of the mountain range, sunlight glinting off the deep azure blue of the glacial lake. She doesn’t even notice anything around her, just soaks in the scene until she suddenly feels a body pressing into her from behind.

She gasps, her hands tightening on the railing of the ship’s upper deck—but she soon smiles as Emma’s arms wind around her belly just below her breasts, letting her head fall back to give room for Emma to press lazy kisses of the base of her neck and closing her eyes. Whatever incredible sights Emma might be giving her, this— _this_ —tops them all.

“Is this good?” Emma murmurs against the corner of her jaw. Regina twists her neck around to kiss her, slow and deep.

“Yes. This is good.”

After that, they have dinner on the top deck, watching the moons—all four of them, white and gold and red and blue—rising and the sky slowly fill with stars. The otherwise-still water of the lake seems to glitter from reflections of the tiny pinpricks of light indicating settlements on the shoreline, and it’s almost as beautiful as the sunset had been. They pay no heed, though; Emma is too busy telling Regina all about her final entanglements with Cora’s agents on New Earth.

“They were tough,” Emma says. “Like, really tough. If I hadn’t been prepared, they probably would have gotten me—they definitely would have gotten me, like they did just before we met.”

Regina remembers back to that night: the massive explosion shattering the winter calm, the fiery crater in the middle of her backyard, the strange woman she’d pulled out of it. “I wonder what you were like before that,” Regina muses, “in your previous life.”

Emma shrugs, looks down at her plate. “Same as I was after, I guess. More closed off, more likely to run.”

Regina reaches over to clasp her hand. “You don’t need to do that any more. You have a home now.”

Emma’s eyes snap up to hers, wide and glimmering with reflected starlight, and she opens her mouth to say something, to respond—but doesn’t.

Regina blinks. “Emma?” But Emma is now staring at something behind her, and her brow has furrowed. Regina turns around, looking for whatever could possibly have distracted her at a moment like _this—_ then, after a few seconds’ searching, she spots a small black sphere one the ground, about the size of her fist.

She frowns. “Is that—”

The sphere detonates with a deafening boom and a blinding flash, filling the room with acrid smoke. Regina dives instinctively for the floor, coughing as she falls onto all fours beneath the table.

“Emma,” she calls out between coughs, scrambling around on hands and knees despite being completely dazzled by the scorching white light that had filled the room. “Emma!”

Something cold and metallic is pressed to the base of her skull, and she freezes.

“Don’t you dare move, _your majesty,_ ” a woman’s voice says, ice-cold and brittle. “Get up.”

Regina swallows, and does as she’s told—she’s in absolutely no doubts as to _what_ is being pointed at the back of her head, and what it would do to her if she tried anything rash. “Who—what the hell is this?”

“Did you really think you could sneak around without us noticing?” a male voice says, and as white lights clear from her eyes she sees that it belongs to a brown haired man holding a gold-plated rifle pointed straight at her hearts, dressed in regal purples and whites—a Time Lord, Regina realises instantly. Definitely, definitely a Time Lord. “The Black Queen may have lost her regenerations and been banished, but we should have know that she’d have sent her _spawn_ to continue her evil work—”

Regina doesn’t find out what exactly that _evil work_ is, though, because out of the smoke a body comes hurtling into the man, knocking him to the ground, and Regina takes her chance. Moving with the speed and grace that her regained biology has granted her, she twists around and knocks the gun out of the woman’s hand and, in the same motion, pulls out her own plasma gun—her personal favourite, due to how it tends to set its target on fire—from the invisible holster at her waist that she now wears by habit.

The woman is expecting it, though, and just as Regina is raising the gun to eye level, she pulls out a second gun and aims it at Regina’s face before Regina can pull the trigger.

No one moves.

Slowly, tentatively, both Regina and the woman with short, dark hair back away from each other. The man and _his_ assailant—which turns out to be Emma, _of course_ , do the same, having also aimed hidden guns at each other, until the pairs of them reach opposite sides of the narrow ship and stop, two against two.

Emma tightens her grip on the gun, aims it higher. “Who the fuck are you?” she barks out, subtle as ever in a crisis.

The Time Lord and Time Lady who had attacked them seem unfazed. “We are Lord Nolan and Lady Blanchard of Gallifrey,” they demand, so ostentatiously that Regina has to stop herself rolling her eyes. “And we are here to stop the evil of the Black Queen forever.”

Emma gives a sidelong, querying glance at Regina, which is returned with one of Regina’s, carrying an unspoken _no, I have no idea either._

“Right,” Emma says cautiously, not daring to lower her pistol one inch. “Well, I’m Emma Swan and Regina is my family, so I suggest you back the fuck off or—”

Emma doesn’t explain or _what_ , though, because at that moment their two counterparts lower their guns and stare at Emma in shock.

“Emma?” the woman whispers. “Is that really you?”

 

* * *

 

Really, Regina should have predicted this.

She should have expected that just as she thought that her family would be _free_ of Cora and her influence, it would still come back to twist her life and some bizarre, unfathomable way.

Though in this case, it’s not _her_ life being thrown upside-down. It’s Emma’s.

“It was so difficult for us, giving you up as a baby,” the Time Lady—Mary Margaret, they learn—tells Emma, face shining with tears. “We felt we had no choice, but it nearly killed David and I.”

Emma shifts in her seat, squirming a little under the floodlights of attention being directed towards her. She gives a quick, helpless glance to Regina, but Regina stays back—this isn’t her moment to intrude, and besides these two might try shooting her again if she does. “Yeah, well, Earth’s a pretty nice place,” she says, accompanying with a high, brittle laugh that makes Regina cringe. “So I turned out okay.”

“You turned out more than okay,” David says, placing a hand on Emma’s shoulder. “All we could do was hope that you’d grow up to be the strong, beautiful woman you’ve become.”

Now Emma _definitely_ looks uncomfortable, and her voice is small when she asks, “Why’d you do it though? I mean—I know that there was a prophecy and all, but couldn’t you have found something else?”

“We tried, Emma,” Mary Margaret says, seizing Emma’s hand and gripping it like a vice. “We tried _so_ hard. But even after the Black Queen was stripped of her regenerations and banished, we knew that her daughter would return,” she continues, throwing a lethal glare at Regina which is returned with interest, “And the war would begin anew. You were the only hope, our saviour.”

Emma laughs again, looks down at the table. “Yeah, well, I guess it was right in the end. I saved Regina, she ended the war,” she says, her eyes snapping up to Regina with sudden brightness and a smile. Regina fights the urge to smile back. “Cora died a month ago.”

Mary Margaret’s eyebrows shoot upwards, she blinks in surprise. “Oh. You mean—you killed her?” she asks, addressing Regina for the first time. “The Black Queen is dead?”

“You don’t need to sound so pleased,” Regina says stiffly. “She _was_ my mother, whatever crimes she may have committed before. But yes, I—I killed her,” she admits, swallowing down the catch which had threatened to form in her throat.

“Oh. Well, I—I’m sorry for your loss,” Mary Margaret says, not sounding sorry in the slightest. “But doing so has ended a terrible conflict that has cost billions of lives and countless worlds and threatened to burn Gallifrey to the ground—though I guess you know all about this,” she adds acidly.

Now Regina _does_ roll her eyes. “I know nothing about _burning things to the ground—_ if you have a problem with arsonists, I suggests you call the police,” she says sardonically. She hears Emma suppress a snort, which makes it worth it, but Mary Margaret and David look completely nonplussed.

“I know almost nothing about Cora’s past before I was born. I didn’t even know she wasn’t human until a few weeks ago, and I have absolutely no intention of following in her footsteps. Being Mayor of Storybrooke and looking after my son is more than enough for me.”

Unexpectedly, Mary Margaret and David soften. “You have a son?” Mary Margaret asks curiously.

“ _We_ have a son,” Emma interjects, and this time, Regina smiles at her.

 

* * *

 

It takes another hour and a half for them to be free of Emma's parents. Most of that time is spent nodding along to their tales of Gallifrey and the amazing sights supposedly available there, or stiffly answering questions about Emma's life, how she met Regina, Emma's life, what Henry is like, and Emma's life. Emma gives away very little substantive, and Regina knows that she just wants to be _gone._ So after reassuring them that yes, they will bring Henry and visit them on Gallifrey soon and yes, they are welcome in Storybrooke for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners—but _only_ Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, at least until Emma is comfortable with them and Regina can stand having them in her town—they help repair the carnage their brief tussle had caused and depart.

Emma remains very quiet as she pilots the Bug away from the boat—not back home, Regina notices, but to deep space, to the quiet sanctuary she instinctively turns to when threatened. Regina steps up behind her, but stops before she gets too close.

“Emma,” she says quietly. “Are you okay?”

Emma turns, smiles a fragile smile which twists Regina's heart. “Yeah. I'm okay.” She laughs that brittle laugh again. “So. My parents, huh?”

Regina steps closer, feels brave enough to hold Emma's trembling hands in her own. “You know as well as I do that that's what most of them are like.” She looks up at Emma, tries to smile. “I guess they would have spoilt you silly if you'd grown up with them.”

Emma laughs again, this time softer, more genuine. “Yeah. They probably would've.”

Regina holds the smile for a moment—then lets it fall, her lips pressing into a sombre frown as she looks down at their joined hands. “I'm sorry about that, Emma. That you had to grow up without them.”

Emma frowns. “Why? It wasn't your fault. You weren't the one who made them send me away.”

“But I _was,_ Emma. Their fear of my mother, their fear of _me—_ that was what made them give you up. _My family_ is the one who did this to you, and I don't know how—”

“Hey,” Emma says softly, then gathers Regina into her arms, swaying from side to side as Regina rests her head in the crook of Emma's neck. “There is no _my family_ or _your family_ , okay? Just ours. Only ours.”

Regina nods, holds on tighter.

“And you aren't your mother,” Emma continues. “I know you, and I know you're worried about that, but whatever she was—you aren't _that_.”

Regina shakes her head, disentangles herself. “But I killed her.” She looks up at Emma—and suddenly, it hits.

“Oh my—I _killed_ her, Emma. She was helpless and regenerating and I— _I_ _killed her._ ”

She falls, crumples—but Emma catches her, lowers her gently to the floor, following all the way, murmuring _I know, I know, I know_ in her ear as she shakes and trembles. “What have I done—what do I _do_ , Emma?” she asks, helpless and lost. “What kind of person am I that I can kill _my own mother_ in cold blood?”

Emma puts her hands on Regina's cheeks, lifts her face so they're seeing eye to eye, her expression gentle, so gentle. “The kind who'd do anything to protect the people they love. You're the kind of person who keeps their promises.”

Regina swallows, blinks away tears. “I didn't promise—I said I would do what I needed to do, but not _that_.”

“But you _did_ do what you had to do. I was awake, Regina. I know what happened. She'd basically already killed me. She was about to kill you. Then she'd go after Henry, and he'd be _lucky_ if she only killed him. And you heard my par—Mary Margaret and David. She wouldn't have stopped there, she'd have turned the whole universe to dust if no one had stopped her. You did what you had to do.”

Regina keeps her eyes lowered, shakes her head again. “That doesn't make me feel better, Emma. I still—at night I just have these dreams, _nightmares_ where I'm that Queen they talked about, destroying planets and wiping out whole species, and then I wake up and I feel that  _rage_  inside me, like I need to burn down the whole universe and it—it reminds me that I'm _her daughter_ , and I  _killed my own mother_.”

A gentle brush of lips on her forehead. “I know, and we can talk about that later. But whatever happens, I love you anyway. Henry loves you anyway.” A pause, and Regina looks up to soft, bright eyes and a sweet, sweet smile. “That counts for more, right?”

Regina stares at her—and then, despite herself, she smiles, rests her forehead against Emma's and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

 

* * *

 

They arrive home at about eleven, and the house is already dark when they enter. They don't speak or discuss it at all, but by silent assent they go straight to Henry's room, quietly open the door. It isn't their intention to wake him, just _be_ with him, but his eyes blink open anyway.

“Mom? Emma?” he says sleepily as Regina kneels down beside his bed, Emma next to her. “You're home already?”

“You _did_ tell us not to come home too late,” Regina teases gently, and he smiles.

“Did your date go well?” he asks innocently.

Regina opens her mouth—but her voice catches, and Emma has to cover. “Yeah, kid. We had a great night.”

She doesn't tell him about his grandparents, Regina notices—but that's another conversation for another time, and they have plenty of that.

“Good. So are you done with all the stuff now?”

Now it's Emma's turn to look with wide, helplessly frightened eyes at Regina. Regina's heart twists, because even now, even _here_ , in their son's room after everything they've been through, Emma _still_ can't believe that she actually _has this._

But Regina nods immediately, and Emma smiles. "Yeah. It's all done."

“Your ma is home now," Regina adds softly.

Henry looks at her, then at Emma, considers her with a slightly creased brow for a second—then his face relaxes and he smiles, satisfied. “Good,” he says softly. “Love you, ma.”

Emma freezes for a moment, her mouth hangs open slightly—then she leans forward, holds and kisses the back of his hand. “Love you too, Henry,” she murmurs, then stands to leave.

Regina stays for a little longer, smoothing hair away from his face.

“Mom?” he asks, his voice slurred with tiredness.

 _Mom, mom, mom—_ how can a single word make Regina's heart feel so _light?_ “Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can we go somewhere tomorrow?”

Regina has to bite down on a laugh. “No, Henry. You have school tomorrow, remember?”

He doesn't answer for a moment, then—“Oh. I forgot. What about on the weekend?”

She can't help it this time; the laugh bubbles out of her, overflowing from her lips. “Of course, corázon. Wherever you want.”

He closes his eyes. “Cool.” His smile fades, his expression becomes more sombre, and Regina wonders why, until—“I love you, mom.”

She chokes down a sob, smiles and smiles and smiles, kisses his forehead and lets it linger. “I love you too, Henry. I love you too.”

 

* * *

 

She closes the room to Henry's door behind her and switches off the hallway light. She fully intends to go straight to bed after a fairly tiring—if enjoyable and, in its own way, cathartic—evening, but she notices that the light to the unused guest room opposite her bedroom is on, and the door is open.

Unsurprisingly, Emma is inside, standing dead still with her arms folded across her chest in the completely bare room.

“Henry and I cleared it during the week,” Regina says from the doorway, and Emma turns around. “You know, now—”

“—that I'm finished cleaning up Cora's mess, yeah.” Emma gives her a smile, but it's a little smaller than she's expecting. “I thought I'd be moving into your room.”

Regina _had_ considered that, had _strongly_ considered it, but—“You're welcome to, of course, but I thought we should take things slow. Plus, Henry is just down the hall—if we sleep together in that room every night, we might scar him for life. Especially since we don't need anywhere near as much sleep as he does.”

Emma laughs, the room gets brighter. “Yeah, you're right about that,” she says, and then _that_ smirk reappears on her face. “Plus, we've got the Bug for that sort of thing, right?”

And Regina _still_ doesn't understand how Emma can make her flushed and heated just with a single look—“At least _try_ to keep your mind out of the gutter, Miss Swan.”

Emma laughs again, low and soft. “Sorry. But you're right, we should take things slow. Especially since, you know, it'd be kind of awkward if we got sick of each other too fast and had to spend the rest of time playing awkward exes with a kid.”

Emma's voice is light, but Regina can hear the hard, sharp blade of fear hidden beneath her words. “No,” Regina says, and means it, “no, that wouldn't do at all.”

“Right.” Emma turns around, looks at the room again. “Anyway, I was, uh, just thinking about how I'd decorate the room. Maybe I'll head to Ikea tomorrow, buy some things.”

Regina gapes at her. “All of time and space and you want to go to _Ikea?_ ”

“They've got cool stuff!” Emma explains, her eyes abnormally bright. “I could buy a bunk bed, I've always wanted a bunk bed.”

Regina thinks she's joking, but then she notices that Emma's expression hasn't changed at all. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “You can't be serious.”

“I am serious! Like, it would be so _cool_ to have a bunk bed here,” she says, pointing at one corner of the room, “And one of those cube cabinets here, and I'd paint the room yellow like my Bug—”

And that is a line Regina _will_ not cross. “Absolutely not.”

Emma looks like a child who's had her ice cream stolen from her. “What's wrong with yellow?”

“It's _hideous_.”

“It's my room!”

“It's _my house,”_ Regina reminds her, standing her ground. Emma pouts, and Regina sighs.

“Ikea—fine, but no yellow. _Anything_ but yellow.”

Emma brightens immediately, and Regina knows she's made a terrible, terrible mistake. “You'll need money for all this,” she points out.

Emma shrugs. “That's fine. I still have some Earth money left over from when I was last here for a while, and I can get a job. Be a private investigator or something, help people out.”

And it's the casual way that Emma says _help people out_ , like it's nothing, like it's the most natural, most obvious thing in the world, that reminds Regina why she'd been so inexorably drawn towards Emma in the first place, like a moth to the brightest, most unquenchable of flames.

“So you're okay with this? Living here with us?” Regina asks, trying not to betray how much she _wants_ this. “Between trips, of course,” she adds quickly.

Emma turns away. Her posture is drawn in, tense and vulnerable, and Regina waits for her.

“I meant—if you two are okay with this, sure."

Regina blinks. "Why wouldn't we be? I've told you for weeks that I was going to make space for you—oh," she realises suddenly, when the pronoun she'd used hits her. "Henry."

Emma flinches, bows her head. "I mean—yeah. We've had some chats."

Regina berates herself, furious that she'd  _missed this—_ in fact, not even that. She'd  _seen_ this, even amongst all the chaos, the worrying, the threat and the running around of the period either side of Cora's death, she'd seen how Emma and Henry's relationship had changed and completely failed to grasp what it meant.

" _That's_ why he's been so strange over the last few weeks," she mutters. "If there's anything I can do—"

"No," Emma interjects immediately, firmly. "This is my problem to solve, I'll solve it."

"We're a family, Emma. There is no _my problem,_ " Regina says, echoing Emma's words from before.

Emma shakes her head, looks a little ashamed. "I know, but I—I didn't want to involve you when you two have already been through so much, you know? This is our thing. It's not like he doesn't have a point."

Regina swallows, realises that the upcoming conversation with her son about their newly extended family has suddenly become much more complicated. "This is different, Emma."

"Is it? I mean, they gave me up for my best chance, like I did with Henry. So if I can be mad at them, why can't Henry be mad at me? What's the difference?"

"The difference is that Henry found a home," Regina reminds her. Emma is still looking away, shielding her face. Regina exhales a little, finally understands that this isn't about Henry. Not really, not after tonight. "Emma, _linda_ , let me help. I've been where you are, remember? I can help you get through this like you helped me—"

"Regina, it's okay," Emma says, looking up—and to Regina's surprise, she's smiling and calm. "I mean—he isn't  _happy_ about it, but we'll be okay. In a way he already knew why I did it. It'll just take time to internalise it, I guess."

Regina breathes out—she's still feeling apprehensive, aware of Emma's instincts to bury her worries deep within, aware that Henry's mood swings can turn on a sixpence and Emma does  _not_ react well to being on the wrong end of one, but she has to trust Emma about this. Despite appearances, Emma is older, Emma is wiser, Emma knows what she's doing. Regina smiles back.

"Alright. So if you're going to stay, what do you think about this, then?" she asks, gesturing at their surroundings, trusting that Emma will know it's not really the room she's talking about.

"I don't know, really. I never thought I'd have anything like this,” Emma says, looking away from Regina and at one of the blank walls. “Like, a room of my own in a house that doesn't move. I don't really know how it works, you know?”

Regina steps forward, close enough to touch, but she keeps her hands to herself. “You thought your Bug would be your only home.”

“Yeah. Crazy, right?” Emma says with a thin laugh. “I really thought I'd spend my whole life in that time machine, running and running around the universe until I just, y'know, stopped.”

“But even this isn't permanent,” Regina points out. “I won't be Mayor forever, and I'll probably get tired of Storybrooke before long. The Bug is probably more your home than this building will ever be.”

“I know. But like—this is different, you know?” she says, and Regina knows, Regina understands immediately. She steps forward and Emma turns around, looks her in the eye. “Living with you and Henry like this, it'll feel—”

“—like a real home,” Regina finishes, and reaches out to take one of Emma's hand, fingers entwining together like the tendrils of regeneration energy which had saved them both. “And a real family. This is everything you ever wanted, isn't it?”

There are stars in Emma's eyes, stored reflections of all the amazing but lonely places they had seen before, promises of the incredible sights they'd see in their future as a family. _Their family._

“Right back at you,” Emma says, smiling. "You've got so much about yourself to find out too. Who knows, maybe you've got more family waiting out there, somewhere in the universe. Like a long-lost sister, or something."

Regina snorts. "A hidden sister, knowing my mother?" But her amusement fades as she considers it more carefully. "You could be right about that, actually."

"Well, whatever it is, we'll find it," Emma says softly, and her expression is peaceful and calm. "That's what we do."

Regina smiles at her, warm like the first rays of sun in a summer's morning, gently squeezes Emma's hand, feels Emma squeeze back. They both turn away to look at the blank, whitewashed wall again, hand-in-hand as they contemplate all the things they'd build, all the memories they'll store, all the _life_ they'll create together, here in this room. To herself, Regina wonders whether yellow wouldn't be so bad after all—but that's a question for another time.

And they have all the time in the universe.

 

* * *

 

  _But I do know that I could still fall for_  
_a swish of light that comes barreling_  
_and cascading towards me._  
  
_It will resemble your sweet definite hands._  
_The universe will bend._  
_The planets will bow._  
_And I will say “Oh, there you are. I been waitin’ for ya. Now we can go.”_  
  
_And the two pilot lights go zoooooooom_  
_into the black construction paper night_  
  
_as somewhere else_  
_two other lovers lie down on their backs and say_  
_“What the hell was that?”_

 _—_ Derrick Brown;  _A Finger, Two Dots, Then Me_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And they lived happily ever after until the end of time etc, etc, etc.


End file.
